Projects | Science Communication Institute

SCI invents, launches and manages a variety of projects to help improve science communication. By necessity, of course, the projects we end up really focusing on are the onces that attract enough funding support to make them sustainable. We’re always searching for more funding to make more projects possible! Since late 2014, most of SCI’s funding and bandwidth has supported the Open Scholarship Initiative, our largest project to-date.

Most active

The Open Scholarship Initiative

The Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) is an ambitious, global, multi-stakeholder effort to improve the flow of information within research and between researchers, policymakers, funders and the general public. OSI’s main goals are to:

improve global access to research outputs like journal reports and data
make it easier for researchers everywhere to be full participants in the global research environment, and
create more benefit for research and societies everywhere as a result of this improved openness.

There is no other undertaking in the world like OSI. Our group (participants and alumni) includes over 450 high-level representatives from 27 countries, 250 institutions, and 20 stakeholder groups in research and scholarly communication. We are the only organization taking such a broad and inclusive approach to this complex and important challenge, and we have developed what is arguably the world’s most complete understanding of this very complex issue space.

The OSI project has been active since late 2014 and will continue until late 2024 when our policy development agreement with UNESCO expires. OSI fills the “NOASIR” role for UNESCO—we are part of UNESCO’s Network for Open Access to Scientific Information and Research. UNESCO pays attention to and has helped support OSI’s efforts to connect a wide range of stakeholders in this space, better understand open policies and practices around the world, and defend access to scientific journals to developing countries. OSI has had a seat at the table in helping develop the United Nation’s open science policies over the last few years.

For more information about OSI’s history, mission and goals, please visit the OSI website at www.osiglobal.org.

OSI website

On the drawing board

Science Communication Network

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.

Conferences

SCI is planning to organize more conferences on important topics as our budget allows. Most of our conferences to-date have revolved around our largest project, OSI. Our 2013 Journals & Science conference laid the groundwork for OSI, which was launched the following year.

Journals & Science

SCI Profile Series

What does science communication look like through the eyes of experts who actually do this work for a living? SCI published a fascinating series of interviews with filmmakers, scientists, and others. More interviews will be coming soon.

SCI Profiles

All-Scholarship Repository

What are the pros and cons of having a single repository for all science research? OSI has been debating this issue for several years and tracking the progress of similar ideas. OSI may try to prototype this idea, but if it doesn’t, then SCI will.

Learn More

Science Clubs Upgrade

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.

Climate Change Research Network

SCI is in the early stages of considering what a broad, multi-disciplinary network of researchers would look like whose purpose is to share research on climate change and work together on solutions. This network might be modeled after OSI, or launched as an OSI demonstration project.

Past efforts

SCI has invested significant time and effort on a number of other projects since 2011. These projects are currently inactive but may be reactivated depending on funding and interest. Other projects are also currently under consideration.

SCI Newsletter

SCI published a science communication newletter 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 and not links to existing content). The more news we published, the more invisible we became. So regretfully, we pulled the plug on this valuable project in late 2014.

SCI Newsletter

SciComm Book

SCI’s very first efforts involved trying to launch a new scicomm journal and also create a new scicomm guidebook. While we haven’t entirely thrown in the towel on these efforts, the field is still too disparate for these projects to have a clear audience, so our reception may end up being lukewarm for now. We did end up writing a chapter for a scicomm textbook in 2021 which covered a wide range of topics (the Routledge Handbook of Science Communication).

Scicomm Crowdfunding Site

This 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.

STEM Speakers Bureau

The basic idea of this project was to make expert STEM speakers available for free to interested schools. However, after a few years of trying, we simply didn’t attract enough funding support to build a prototype.

SciComm PhD Program

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.

Other

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).