since i became faculty (1,5 years ago, i’m a newbie), i’ve had the wish to be more transparent with my research output and share findings with community. the scientific talks making their way to youtube, papers with open access that can be read by anyone etc are really cool and sweet opportunities but i also feel like the language goes over my head even when i don’t know the field that well. so i was hoping to make things more accessible. i sign up for community talks, organize community events to share research updates but it’s of course not possible to get into the individual studies. so i started off with checking out the “news outlet” of the university and reached out to them. apparently they can write news pieces based on an interview with you, but it has to be BEFORE the paper is published so they can post the news right after the paper gets published. it’s not “news” if the paper has already been published. so we did the interview while the paper was under review (minor revisions, so i had more hope it would get accepted), they wrote up a piece, sent back to me for my edits, and then i alerted them when the paper got published so they pushed out the piece right away.
i thought it was a nice experience, and will probably aim for it again when i have a fancy publication. but i also thought about making graphical abstracts that are for the community. i’m not the most creative, but i really love the graphical abstracts, so i figured ok why not try to make them easier to understand for a layperson and we can have them as almost flyers at community events too. i live in the us, so i felt i can aim for english & spanish. thankfully we had an awesome coordinator, Lex, at our department (uni of colorado anschutz, neurology) that volunteered for spanish translations (my spanish is rusty…) and i get to work with a fabulous coordinator Ellie who is waaaaaaaaaaay more capable than me at creating visual resources. so we put these together:
we shared them on the center’s social media accounts and the newsletter. we’re also sneaking them into the clinics so while people are waiting, they can check out these updates from our team. we just finished the english version of another one, but Lex is gone (he got into grad school, so super stoked for him of course!!!) Ellie’s trying to find someone else who might be willing to help for the spanish translation, and we’re hoping after these two attempts we’ll have a more organized way of approaching things. i always think people in the community are the primary stakeholders in any research i do, i do it for them, with them, and they should hear what their efforts resulted in. while there’s definitely a limit to transparency, i don’t want anyone taking our research findings as the gospel truth, i’m hoping eventually this will help the people we work with feel more comfortable about and supportive of the research we do.
long story short, these are just my experiences with dissemination of our publications so far. does anyone have ways of sharing their findings with the community? do you feel it’s unnecessary or needed? what works for you? or what didn’t work? tell meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Wow, these resources from your work are so cool! Thanks for sharing your experiences!
For me, things are a little different since I moved from academia into the commercial sphere. I’m sometimes quite limited in the type of information that I can share, until my company is ready to launch some news. That’s one reason why I’m so happy to be involved with the DCoP and working groups, as I can share knowledge and experiences around working with the open datasets, without giving away my company’s secrets.
When I was an academic, I kind of had the opposite problem. I felt like my PhD work and postdoc contributions were often too niche and highly specialized to be a good subject for something like a news article. So even although I COULD share, I felt like no one wanted to hear! As I progressed in my academic career and started to manage a portfolio of projects, it became easier to see common threads and to build a higher level story which might have wider appeal. I also got more involved with consortium research projects, which automatically tend to have wider scope and bigger potential impact than an individual researcher’s work.
So I guess in both cases I’m keen to work with others in some capacity, so that we can tell the bigger stories! And together we can make the results of our research more applicable to the community at large.
that’s a good point! if you’re at a company/workplace that you’re not actually “allowed” to share, how does it work! for the news launching, do they involve you in the process at all so you can share the background info of what went down?
i think even the uber niche projects can be impactful for community because they can learn how research is done and we really divide and conquer, can’t do it all. gotta get into the teeny tiny aspects of a problem to figure things out at times and i try to even share those things so people know how research works. our lives are unfortunately not “let’s cut open a bunch of brains and pinpoint this disease to a region, then re-build that region with a 3d printer real quick”, so community should know that too. your work was/is impactful no matter how grand the project scope is.
Yes, I’m happy to say that I’m generally involved at all stages of the news generation process! Sometimes the media team will ask for new work or ideas, and sometimes I know my work has reached a certain result that would be good to share, and I’ll give them a brief overview of the concept for the post. This is essentially the “elevator pitch”: the headline result and why it could be impactful, with an eye to the type of audience we would be aiming for. (This helps to decide on the format for sharing the news: sometimes we’ll do academic papers, white papers, webinars, press releases, weblog posts on LinkedIn, interactive dashboards, media interviews, or podcasts, all depending on who we think the main audience would be.)
If it’s a long-form piece like an academic paper or webinar, I’ll typically take the first pass at creating the content. For something more business-facing such as a press release, someone on the media team is likely to do the first draft. In all cases, everyone signs off on the content before it goes out, so I always get oversight on how the message is being delivered.
Sometimes things are embargoed for a period of time, or we want to sync up release of news with something else happening in the company or community, so sometimes there are news items “in the hopper” that we’re not quite ready to share. I leave the decisions about exactly how and when to release to others, and just have to be careful about what I say publicly until it’s out there!
that is so cool that you’re so engaged with the whole process!!! for creating the content, do you have a go to if you’re doing any visual goodies?? (i just can’t figure canva out and still use ppt like a dinosaur)
I typically just use draw.io, which is integrated into the document management system that we use (Confluence). It’s pretty bare-bones, so others on the team will sometimes redraw in something like Illustrator to zhuzh it up a bit, depending on the audience! And PowerPoint is a reliable workhorse if I need to make slides anyway!
(he got into grad school, so super stoked for him of course!!!) Ellie’s trying to find someone else who might be willing to help for the spanish translation, and we’re hoping after these two attempts we’ll have a more organized way of approaching things. i always think people in the community are the primary stakeholders in any research i do, i do it for them, with them, and they should hear what their efforts resulted in. while there’s definitely a limit to transparency, i don’t want anyone taking our research findings as the gospel truth, i’m hoping eventually this will help the people we work with feel more comfortable about and supportive of the research we do.
As I progressed in my academic career and started to manage a portfolio of projects, it became easier to see common threads and to build a higher level story which might have wider appeal. I also got more involved with consortium research projects, which automatically tend to have wider scope and bigger potential impact than an individual researcher’s work.