Most of SCI’s current projects focus on the following three priority areas:
Global efforts to address climate change will need to include coordinated global action to remove carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. SCI’s Global Carbon Dioxide Removal Forum will the first major global conference dedicated to creating the necessary high-level global policy coordination framework for this vital work.
Working across disciplines and countries, SCI will continue investigating the best way to fund and develop a global Disinformation Awareness Training & Education program (DATE). This program will unite diverse experts and combine their insights into practical and effective tools, resources and networks.
Through our global Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) project, SCI will continue working with policy makers from around the world on developing sustainable, evidence-based policies for the future of open science, with the goal of ensuring that this future is effective and equitable for research and researchers.
Because science communication is such a disparate and undefined field, SCI worked for several years to pull together a network of practitioners in this field to share insights and experiences. This work has been sidetracked by our management OSI, but we will hopefully get back to it soon.
SCI has always focused on trying to contribute to the knowledge in this space, whether through publishing a newsletter, speaking at numerous conferences, writing science policy analyses for the SCI website, or writing and editing work for other venues, from journal articles to op-ep pieces to books.
Science clubs can be important gateways for kids to get interested in science and stay interested. Not all schools and communities are fortunate enough to have active and capable clubs, though. The goal of this project is to improve the capacity of select clubs nationwide through networking.
SCI has invested significant time and effort on a number of other projects since 2011. Some of these may be revisited in the future depending on funding and interest. Other projects are also currently under consideration.
SCI published a science communication newsletter for the first four years of our existence. However, changes Google made to its search algorithm in 2014 caused newsletter sites like ours to drop far down in search rankings (due to Google’s preference for “original” content). The more we published, the more invisible we became. So regretfully, we pulled the plug on this valuable project in late 2014.
SCI NewsletterSCI organized a conference in 2013 on the role of journals in science. Little did we realize at the time that this conference laid the groundwork for our Open Scholarship Initiative, which was launched the following year.
Journals & ScienceThis is yet another project that may yet find legs. But our experience to-date has been that since the scicomm space is so diverse, there is neither a “main” funding audience, nor is there a single funding call-to-action that resonates with everyone. We may rethink this project in the future, focusing instead on fundraising for specific science communication projects or channels rather than on fundraising for science communication writ-large.
The basic idea of this project was to make expert STEM speakers available for free to interested schools. After a few years of trying, we simply didn’t attract enough funding support to build a prototype. However, this resource is still needed so we may revisit it in time.
Science communication training is needed, but there are very few opportunities for obtaining an advanced degree in this field. Part of the issue here is coherence—the academic community doesn’t agree on what the field looks like, let alone a PhD program. We will revisit this idea once we’ve made more progress definining the field.
Some of the other projects SCI has launched include: conducting surveys to help better understand this field, and to showcase and help share best practices; working behind the scenes to try to make improvements (like consulting with Amazon in 2014-15 on whether/how to sell scholarly journals online); and developing a “science cloud” (which has now merged with the ASR project).