In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published a study entitled Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. In the article, Wakefield and his co-authors argue that there is a link between vaccination for mumps, measles and rubella, and autism in children. Years later, it became known that Wakefield had received GBP 480,000 for the results of the study and had concealed this. Today, the study has been withdrawn and Wakefield is no longer a doctor. However, the content of the “study”, which was not a study, still has an impact today.
Withdrawing a paper. Is that possible?
Articles are withdrawn for various reasons. The withholding and concealment of funding bodies or the concealment of conflicts of interest is one of them. The most common reason is honest mistakes in data collection, analysis, or interpretation. As with any other work, these can also happen in research. However, there is also deliberate data manipulation and plagiarism. AI could play a role in the future. People whol request the retracttion of articles are authors who notice inadequacies in their own work (as in the case of Shaawna Williams in The Scientist), colleagues who notice errors, and editors who become aware of inadequacies during public discussions.
With the new verifiability and the demand on publishers to fulfil their obligations, the career pressure on the credibility of scientists has also increased. The Scientist publishes an annual list of the most important retractions in the sciences (2021, 2022). The community has also become more aware and helpful – a “stronger systems hypothesis” advocated by Danielle Fanelli. Titles with particularly spectacular announcements have recently had to face scrutiny. Following the announcement by Ranga Dias et al. that they had found the first superconductor as a solid at room temperature, the article was first picked apart in the preprint within a few months and then withdrawn by the publisher in 2023 at the request of the co-authors. It was Dias’s third retraction, and the first to make waves in the media: Science reported it, the New York Times reported it, the Wall Street Journal reported it. This tarnishes the credibility of individuals, but strengthens science and its community.
It is normal to make mistakes. It is not surprising that fraud occurs. In addition to ethics and morality, there is also competition, careers and unfair means in science. What is not right, and highly problematic for society, is the long wait and lack of information for those who have cited a retracted paper and have not noticed the errors or fraud. Should retracted papers be deleted or made available to posterity in a labelled form?
As a result, there is still room for improvement in retraction processes. Ivan Heibi and Silvio Peroni, for example, in their article published in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, analyse the retraction notice and find that there are serious differences in both content and metadata. Furthermore, according to the authors, retractions are difficult to find because of their negative connotations. It is therefore advisable to continue to work not only on the review of articles and their content, but also on the approach and publicity. This is a call not only to publishers and the research industry, but also to all those who support the research industry in publishing and disseminating knowledge that is considered reliable.
Immersive experiences are very popular as a tool for science communication. Do they keep their promises?
When I was ten or eleven years old, I visited an exhibition about street children in the Global South with my school. We had previously read the book “Das Tor zum Garten der Zambranos” by Gudrun Pausewang in German class, which is about the friendship between a street boy and the son of a rich family who swap roles. The exhibition perfectly complemented the book reading, as it picked up on many of the themes. The exhibition took visitors to Latin American, Asian and African contexts, complete with reconstructed street scenes and matching artifacts. And visitors experienced the exhibition in uncomfortable improvised slippers made from car tires, as street children often wear.
A quarter of a century later, I still remember this exhibition. But why? My guess: the combination of reading a book, a well-made exhibition and the very tactile car tire slippers was memorable enough to be remembered to this day. An immersive experience of white norther privilege, completely undigital and analog. Today, decades later, immersion is usually thought of as an interweaving of analog and digital experiences. There are numerous specialized providers who are also active in science communication. Immersive virtual reality offers huge potential for communicating science and research. The SciComm portal impact.science therefore sees virtual reality experiences as number 1 of the top 10 science communication trends of 2024. But what exactly are immersive experiences?
Immersion: what?
The Immersive Experience Institute, a kind of think tank from California, provides useful definitions here. Those who want to delve deeper into the question of what constitutes immersive experiences and what their potential and qualities are can find peer-reviewed answers in the Journal of Network and Computer Applications. And those interested in the practical implementation level can, for example, take a look at the Copenhagen-based company Khora, with whom Oikoplus recently collaborated on an EU project submission. The creative team at Khora develops virtual reality and augmented reality for a wide range of applications. The projects in which Khora is involved show how virtual reality is also being used and researched in EU-funded research and innovation projects. For example, in the Horizon Europe project XTREME (Mixed Reality Environment for Immersive Experience of Art and Culture), which was launched in January 2024. In this project, a consortium of 14 partners is researching and developing mixed reality (MR) solutions for experiencing art.
Of course, many applications of virtual reality, augmented reality and immersive technologies are resource-intensive and costly. As a result, their field of application is often of a commercial nature. One example of this is the exhibition “Van Gogh – The Immersive Experience”, which has been successful around the world. But even here, knowledge is conveyed and brought to life.
What are the communicative benefits of immersion?
But do immersive experiences with the support of modern VR and AR technology also lead to measurable communication success? Well, the answer is not quite that simple. Research into this is being conducted selectively: Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz at the University of Missouri, for example, has investigated the effectiveness of VR as a science communication tool. However, for a very specific use case. In an article on LinkedIn, the company Imagineerium, a British provider of technology-supported immersive experiences, writes: “There has not been a great deal of research done on human psychology when exercised in an immersive experience, but some scientists and psychologists are beginning to look into it more as VR grows from strength to strength and immersion is starting to be used in learning experiences.”
It is probably not easy to say whether digital, immersive experiences are a useful communication tool. As is so often the case, it all depends. In any case, they expand the toolbox of science communication. Virtual reality and augmented reality are certainly a useful tool for many a communicative message and many a target group. But not in any case, for everyone, everywhere.
The immersive exhibition I visited as a boy, which was completely analog and which I visited in the late 90s, is a good example of this. I remember the experience of the exhibition, but less about the actual exhibition content. But maybe that was just too long ago.
In this reading list, we want to look at the communication methods think tanks use to bring science into politics.
Professional providers of science communication–whether embedded in research institutions, as companies such as Oikoplus, or think tanks–aim to communicate research results clearly and transparently and make knowledge available for public debate. The target audience for this is diverse. One relevant target group that is usually among the declared addressees of science communication is political decision-makers. In this Reading List, we therefore want to focus on communication methods aimed at policymakers and take a look at think tanks.
Policy oriented think tank work, as stated by Annapoorna Ravichander results in ‘sets of guidelines to help achieve outcomes in a reasonable manner’. They are different from processes and actions. Policies are broad and set a certain direction. While science communication may not have a direct policymaking ambition, it can play a significant role in shaping policy debates, informing decision makers and influencing the development of ideas. And there are methods which can be applied in order to achieve policy influence.
The most central way for science communicators to achieve policy impact, is providing policymakers with expertise and consultation. Science communicators can place researchers as consultants to government agencies, providing input in the policy-making process. There is, however, a challenge in this method. According to Andrea Baertl Helguero, in order to have influence on policy through consulting, think tanks should maintain a strong intellectual transparency and ensure their research is diligent and reliable.
Another crucial method to achieve policy influence is networking. It’s a classic method used by think tanks. As Alejandro Chaufen explains in an article for Forbes, networking allows think tanks to create platforms where ideas can be exchanged and a consensus can be build around policy agendas.
A question of format
An established format for presenting research findings to policymakers are policy briefing papers. A policy brief is a concise, well-researched and informed summary of a particular issue, the policy options for addressing that issue and some recommendations. These briefs are an important tool for presenting research findings and recommendations based on them to a non-scientific audience to support decision-making. Policy briefs allow science communicators to communicate their research and findings in a way that conveys the urgency of the issue and is accessible to people with different levels of knowledge. However, here too, research institutions should ensure transparency and remain independent and transparent when presenting problems, options or proposed solutions.
When policy impact is the declared goal of science communication, this generates a need for anticipatory methods such as foresight and forecasting, which can help inform policy action and increase societal resilience in a sustainable way. Science communicators should take a long-term view of policy change, work over-time and build momentum for the topics and ideas they work with. Mark Halle, for International Institute for Sustainable Development, states that ‘think tanks cannot afford vagueness […]’. They must create outputs, which are clear, targeted, and incorporate a vision of long-term, positive effects.
This text hopefully serves as a good introduction to the question of what can be learned from think tanks when it comes to achieving political impact through science communication. And this leads almost inevitably to the question of how to measure the impact of research in the first place. Fortunately, we have already dealt with this in other Readings Lists, e.g here.
What can we learn from science communication? A reading list based on the experiences of the first five years of Oikoplus.
Relevant target groups may be small.
The success of communication is often measured in reach. Reach is also a hard currency in communication for research and innovation projects. However, science dissemination is often very specific, and it’s small target groups that are particularly relevant for successful project communication. In our Domino-E project, for example, one of the most relevant target groups is the small group of people involved in programming satellite missions for earth observation purposes. This target group is not only small, but it is also not easy to identify the communication channels through which it can be reached. However, the content for this target group is specific enough to be able to assume that the target group will find the relevant content as long as it is easy to find. So we decided to use YouTube as a channel.
Simplifying does not have to mean trivializing.
The closer you zoom in on a topic, the bigger it becomes. Many topics and issues appear straightforward at first glance, and only on closer inspection do their complexity, depth and multi-layered nature become apparent. Nevertheless, it is not wrong to take a superficial look at a topic first and only delve deeper in the second step. For experts who are extremely well-versed in a particular subject area, it is often difficult to allow this superficial view. They are too aware of the aspects that only become apparent on closer inspection. And that’s why the superficial view feels like a simplification to them, and often like a trivialization. It is important to allow simplification. But it should be correct. Our REACT project, which deals with the control of pest insect species, can be summarized easily: Insects are sterilized so that they can mate with wild-type insects in the wild without producing offspring. The insect population shrinks in the medium term due to the lack of offspring. In this way, agriculture is protected from the pest. Technically, this method involves a great deal of effort. Nevertheless, we have tried to explain the project in as simple and understandable terms as possible.
Science communication aims to make research accessible to the general public. This broad public can therefore be found as a target group in the applications and descriptions of many research and innovation projects. However, from a communication perspective, the general public hardly exists. Addressing the public as a whole is damn difficult, or rather: it is impossible. Developing key messages and storytelling approaches automatically involves a selection of target groups. Not everyone finds everything interesting. And if you manage to meet the interests of as many different target groups as possible, that’s already a great communication success. To gain an understanding of how diverse the target groups of our communication in research and innovation projects can be, we have our project partners develop personas in interactive workshops at the start of a project. These are fictitious people who we then use to jointly consider what needs to be done to reach them through our project communication: with which messages, on which channels, when, why, and with what goal in mind? It usually becomes clear quite quickly that the general public is only an auxiliary term that indicates that each project can address many different target groups.
Never underestimate how exciting any topic can be.
How interesting a topic is sometimes isn’t obvious at first glance. No wonder: not every topic can be perceived as equally exciting, and it always depends on how a topic is presented. You could say that it is the job of science communicators like Oikoplus to ensure that a topic arouses the interest of as many people as possible. That is true. But even those who do science communication, first have to find their very own interest in a topic. This does not always happen straight away, which is why it is part of our work to actively seek out approaches to any given topic in which we recognize the potential to tell a story to a specific target group. We therefore force ourselves to be curious and to think empathetically about what the thematic appeal could be for other target groups. Sooner or later, the penny will drop – and then communication will be much easier.
5. Even those who conduct the most exciting research don’t always like to talk about it.
As a journalist, you sometimes have to worm the information you want to convey out of the interviewees. You have to keep asking questions because the interest in conveying information tends to be one-sided. If you’re not doing journalism, but science communication on behalf of science, then this can also happen. This can be surprising, as one would think that the dissemination of information is in the interest of both the scientists and the public and that in the role of the communicator, one only has to do the mediation work. In practice, however, we have often found that researchers sometimes do not always like to talk about their work and that even basic explanations have to be laboriously elicited from them. There is no simple solution to this problem. It is important to build trust, present your communication work as transparently as possible, and create environments in which insights into scientific work are possible. In some cases, this can be a large video shoot in a laboratory with artificial lighting and large camera equipment, and in other cases, it can be a personal one-on-one conversation. In any case, science communication does not happen by itself, even when the most exciting research is communicated.
In science, quality is more important than quantity. In communication, this is sometimes not so clear. When the objectives for project communication are laid down in the applications for research projects, the corresponding KPIs are often set high. After all, a proposal submission should express high ambitions. If it is approved, you then realize that the goals may have been set too high and that publications, press releases, website articles, social media postings, photos, videos, and other project dissemination content can be produced, but that it is not easy to maintain your high-quality standards. High-quality content takes time. In our video series for the REACT project, for example, we try to explain the research project as comprehensively as possible and at the same time as clearly as possible. The first of the explanatory videos can be found here. Producing such videos requires a long and detailed exchange with the researchers involved. This is why dozens of such videos cannot be produced in a project like REACT. This should also be expressed in the objectives at the start of the project.
7. Speed is not everything in communication.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. And also, you have to take time in science communication. In other areas of communication, in journalism, PR, and advertising, speed is often a key quality feature. And there are also moments in science communication when it is important to react quickly. But in general, science communication follows the pace of science. For press relations, for example, this means that you can free yourself a little from the temporal logic of media operations. A research topic does not lose its relevance simply because it is no longer news. If, for example, a research paper was published several weeks ago, it is not pointless from the outset to draw journalists’ attention to the paper. This is a major difference between science communication and some other fields of professional communication work.
You don’t have to fully understand what you are communicating.
At Oikoplus, we often benefit from the fact that we approach the research projects that we support in terms of communication as laypeople. The fact that we are not experts in urban development, archaeology, crop protection, satellite technology, or the energy transition has helped us to ask the right questions in the projects that we implement in these areas. After all, the fact that we don’t immediately understand the methods and innovations of our projects is something we have in common with our target groups. This is not to be understood as a hymn to trivialization. Of course, it helps to familiarize yourself with the topics that are being communicated. But you also don’t have to be afraid to bring your expertise, namely communications expertise, to projects that you initially have no idea about. Don’t be afraid of rocket science. Even rocket scientists are sometimes dependent on communication experts.
Think globally, act globally.
To make an abstract topic accessible, it is often linked to a manageable aspect of people’s everyday lives. This is a common method in journalism. To draw attention to the consequences of global climate change, for example, changes to the ecosystem are described at a local level. This creates relatability. We wrote about this in Reading List #010. So far, so useful. In our communication for European and global research projects, we sometimes lack this local or everyday level. We design communication for international target groups – after all, research is international too. The slogan “think globally, act locally” therefore often becomes “think globally, act globally” for us. In concrete terms, this means that science communication cannot always respond to the needs of different local target groups. This is where translations into dozens of different languages and a lack of mobility alone can lead to failure. Science communication takes place on an international level. As a science communicator, you often have to trust that the topics you are communicating about will find their target groups – not the other way around.
10. Curiosity is the best driver of communication.
If you ask us at Oikoplus what drives us, the answer is easy. It is curiosity. In German, the word for it (Neugier) is derived from the greed (Gier) for something new (Neu). We took a critical look at this in one of our last reading lists. We understand curiosity as the constant interest in new experiences, insights, and perspectives. We see it as a great privilege of science communication that we can constantly learn something new in our work, and it even largely consists of this. We enjoy doing it.
On difficult topics, moral questions, research ethics and conflicts of interest in science communication.
In science, there are subject areas that are teeming with communication pitfalls. Topics that are controversial in society, research that uses controversial methods and technologies with uncertain consequences. They require sensitivity and caution when it comes to communicating their results in an understandable and accessible way to a large and public audience. Ethical questions are often the subject of intense debate, because widespread social values and morals are challenged. Examples of such research topics are genetic engineering, animal experiments in the life sciences or aspects of gender studies in humanities.
Photo by Zuzana Ruttkayova: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-wooden-beach-dock-under-cloudy-sky-7225642/
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood
A researcher involved in one of the projects in which Oikoplus is a partner responsible for science communication and dissemination expressed this in an email just recently: „Our research requires that we are very careful with the information that is out there. I would like to avoid a situation of messaging getting misunderstood or misexplained. I could think of a gazillion ways this could go wrong in a spur of the moment.” Well – it’s hard to completely rule out the possibility of communication being misunderstood.
At the very least, however, there is a very simple rule that can be followed if, because of the sensitivity of a topic, you attach great importance to remaining factually correct and offering as little room for interpretation as possible: Avoid humour, especially in social media. Good humour is the most difficult discipline of entertainment, and most punchlines do not come without collateral damage, without people feeling hit and hurt. Therefore, science communication usually has to be serious, polite and correct. Or else, one deliberately chooses the humorous path, even if it may be risky. Kelleigh Greene has written about humour in science communication for the Scientia blog. She argues that humour and science communication indeed do go together.
No fear of the target audience
Caution is required when communicating sensitive issues. However, one should not completely subject one’s communication to caution and avoid discourse. Science can withstand criticism. However, this does not mean that each individual scientist must be able to withstand criticism. What we always tell our partners in science: Don’t panic! The loudest critics in the discourse are rarely representative of the public as a whole. And sometimes particularly loud criticism belies quiet agreement. Using the CRISPR/Cas9 technology as a case, communication researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands investigated the different perspectives within the Dutch public on this relatively new genetic engineering method. The communication researchers used the Q method, in which statements from study participants (here n=30) are ranked according to the degree of agreement. It turned out that the participants were generally open and optimistic about the CRISPR/Cas9 technology.
Photo by Edward Jenner: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-a-person-s-hands-holding-a-petri-dish-with-blue-liquid-4031369/
Cutting through discursive pitfalls is not easy. Sometimes it is simply impossible. But transparency and openness, can hardly hurt to enable the broadest and most open discussion about research and its results. At Oikoplus, we support researchers in explaining their work and making it accessible. We always advise them not to hide in the process.
At Oikoplus we offer science communication. But why actually? What was the purpose of communicating research results to a broad audience again? Isn’t there a specialised audience for research? Isn’t it enough for those who know about it to read and talk about research? Well. There are valid reasons for a broad approach to scientific outreach. In this Reading List, you will find some of them.
In German, there is the expression “coming down to earth”. The metaphor is used to call for a discussion to be calibrated back to the shared factual basis when it has gotten out of hand and untruths or lies have crept in. Knowledge of facts and facts are the result of research and science. So it is precisely the ground from the metaphor that is at stake. And it is not only experts who walk on this ground, but all of us – even if we all leave it occasionally. Some more rarely, some more often, whether consciously or unconsciously.
For a more inclusive science
In 2015, Mónica Feliú-Mójer summarised for Scientific American’s blog why effective communication makes for better science. When scientists are able to communicate effectively beyond their peers to a broader, non-scientific audience, it strengthens support for science, promotes understanding of its broader importance to society, and encourages more informed decision-making. Communication can also make science accessible to audiences traditionally excluded from the scientific process. It can help science become more diverse and inclusive.
Science for the common good
In texts on science communication, one reads time and again that researchers should not lose contact with society. Of course not. Why should research stand outside society? Ideally, research should serve society. However, this relationship between science and civil society is by no means self-evident. In an article for The conversation, Toss Gascoigne and Joan Leach, both professors at the Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at the Australian National University, argue that the 20th century can be read as a long plea for sience communication in the interest of the common good.
Not even researchers read research papers only
Dmitry Dorofeev takes a short excursion into the history of science communication. In an article on the importance of science communication in layman’s terms, he starts from the 19th century. According to Dorofeev, in 1895 an editor of the Viennese daily newspaper Neue Freie Presse learned by chance about the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen, but recognised the significance and placed an article on the front page of his newspaper. The London Chronicle, the New York Sun, and by the New York Times did later pick up this article. The rapid dissemination of this imaging method in mass media, certainly contributed to the fact that X-ray technology was mentioned in 1000+ scientific articles the following year, says Dorofeev. After all – and this is still true today – researchers do not only inform themselves in specialised publications.
Promotion or PR?
Communicating research and science in a way that as many people as possible can participate is a noble reason. It allows society to benefit and researchers to inform themselves about the work of their colleagues. In addition, science communication increasingly serves as advertising and PR for individual research institutions and science locations. Empirically, Peter Weingart and Marina Joubert at Stellenbosch University in South Africa looked at the motivations to engage in science communication. Based on their findings on the ever-increasing actively pursued science communication, the authors conclude that a distinction between educational and promotional forms of science communication maintains the credibility of science.
There are a number of good reasons for communicating science and the results of research in a way they are understandable and interesting. The most important of all reasons remains that the ground of facts cited at the beginning must be ordered. Because curiosity, knowledge and innovation grow on it.
In our ArcheoDanube project, we are therefore trying to make archaeology accessible to tourists in a sustainable way and to make the results of research on the history of the Danube region accessible to as many people as possible. Indeed, the coordinators just published the fourth newsletter of the Interreg project.
In academia, we read all the time. We read long texts, short texts, monographs, anthologies, and abstracts. In the natural sciences, papers are usually shorter and follow a tightly organised structure. As for the social sciences, by contrast, the texts are longer and more fluid in structure. In both, we find figures of speech, examples and comparisons. They provide a framework for the results and add meaning. Across all disciplines, however, readers devote energy depending on the quality of the text. Reading energy is what this Reading List is all about.
Et= Esyn+Esem
In 2014, alarm bells were ringing all across the US scholarly community: for the first time in 35 years, scholars were reading fewer! Soon it turned out that the analysis was wrong and the title of the article confusing: scientists read 264 articles per year or 22 per month and have never been reading more. In an article published in Nature, Richard Van Noorden provides insight into the details of scientists’ reading habits.
For every new article, colleagues engage with previously unfamiliar narratives and writing styles. Without knowing the content, they invest energy in it. The total energy required to process a sentence (Et) is made up of two components: syntactic energy (Esyn) and semantic energy (Esem). At least, this is how Jean-Luc Lebrun argues in the book “Scientific Writing” published in 2007.
The best way to understand the energy required is … well … to read. How difficult is it for you to decode long, complex sentences and – more importantly – were you able to grasp the contents alongside their structure? To clarify the complexity of self-written sentences, it helps to underline all the main statements (the compound of noun and verb). The greater the gaps between the underlined passages, the more cumbersome the formulations. We have arrived at Lebruns’ core.
There are a number of strategies to help readers save energy when decoding sentence structures and instead spend it on understanding the content. In 2013, Tomi Kinnunen et al. from the University of Eastern Finland published SWAN – Scientific Writing Assistant. Outlined in a paper, SWAN built on the premises established by Lebrun and looked for particularly challenging sentence structures in texts: nested sentences, nominal structures, and long-windedness. Today, digital solutions such as Grammarly take over this function. But beware and continue breaking grammatical structures if beneficial to the readability. Also in academic essays.
Punctuation marks are particularly important when breaking up sentence structures: Commas, semi-colons, colons and dashes. In a blog post by the Writing Cooperative, Karen deGroot Karter shows how punctuation supports readability. Stephen Wilbers is more detailed. He devotes Week 21 of Mastering the Craft of Writing to the use of punctuation marks. His thesis is that while all punctuation separates, they offer different stylistic possibilities. Commas can be played around with.
Concluding remarks
Readability can be measured. For this text, a WordPress plugin did the job. The Flesch Reading Ease of this Reading List is 49,5. The text is considered difficult to read. The reason for the low score are sentences that are too long and too few transition words. However, it would be wrong to be put off by this. There are certainly readers and authors who would describe the text as easily readable and – overall – understandable. Assuming there are 22 articles a month and 264 articles read by every scientist per year, this likely applies to many scholarly publications. Nevertheless, examining one’s own writing from an energy perspective is certainly helpful. It’s a crucial step in making individual thinking and ideas approachable to others.
In this rather short reading list, we address the question of whether there are ethical standards that science communication should adhere to. A simple answer is: yes, of course. On closer examination, however, the question is not so trivial. For debates about ethical issues are omnipresent in science as well as in the communication industry. The laws of the communications industry do not apply to science. Scientific standards do not apply to the communications industry. In practice, this not-so-small difference became clear at the beginning of the Corona pandemic, when the government of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia commissioned a study and this was then exploited to the maximum by a professional PR agency, possibly also leaving the interpretation of the scientific results to the PR agency. The case is summarised in a (German) article by KOM- Magazin für Kommunikation.
The Good Scientific Practice
The high standards it sets for itself in the production of knowledge make research become science. These standards of scientific work include transparency and the reproducibility of its methods as well as aspects such as honesty, accountability and reliability. In sum, adherence to scientific standards leads to Good Scientific Practice. Scientific standards are the answer to the question of how research must be conducted in order to be recognised as science. They ensure that scientific knowledge is distinguishable from empirical knowledge, anecdotal knowledge, mere tradition or religious knowledge. They ensure scientific integrity. A comprehensive definition of these standards can be found in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.
Constant Self-Assessment
However, Good Scientific Practice alone is not necessarily sufficient to also meet ethical standards. Good scientific practice answers the question of how research is to be conducted in order to have integrity. Ethical standards also touch on the question of what should or should not be done in research. This involves the role of human and animal test subjects in research, the handling of personal data, from photos to the individual human genome. When it comes to the question of ethics in science, many research institutions rely on the constant self-assessment of researchers. The European Commission provides guidelines for the implementation of such self-assessments in EU-funded projects.
The Good Science-PR
All this concerns science. But what about ethics in science communication? Are there also standards and criteria for good science PR and dissemination, or even for the ethically correct SciComm? To put it in a nutshell: Yes, there are such standards, e.g. set up in 2016 by Wissenschaft im Dialog and the German Federal Association of University Communication (Bundesverband Hochschulkommunikation). They can be found here.
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