SPIs for excellent scicomm @CCSC21, Barcelona
More than 300 science communication professionals gathered from September 29th to October 1st at the VIII Congress of Social Communication of Science (CCSC21) held in CosmoCaixa Museum in Barcelona, Spain.
Since its kick-off in 1999, the CCSC has become the most significant Spanish-speaking space for debate about science communication and journalism. “Communication and planetary welfare”: this was the theme of the 2021 edition, which had 6 plenary and several parallel sessions.
How to define excellent science communication? This was the challenging question raised by the Catalan Association for Scientific Communication (ACCC) during the parallel session “Research in Science Communication”.
«Within the ENJOI European project, we are working on the co-creation and selection of a set of standards, principles and indicators for excellent open scientific communication. We call them SPIs, and we believe they might help science communicators and journalists to improve their work in a practical way» says Raul Toran, ACCC’s project manager, who gave a talk entitled ENJOI: definiendo principios, estándares e indicadores de una comunicación científica de excelencia.
Defining standards, principles and indicators (SPIs) for excellent science communication is one of the overall goals of ENJOI - Engagement and Journalism Innovation for Outstanding Open Science Communication.
The Catalan Association for Scientific Communication was in charge of developing the SPIs from the existing academic literature, exploring grey literature and consulting various experts in the field. It was possible to identify a set of documents that can be considered a representative sample of previous efforts to define SPI. Combining individual work with co-creation activities, the team developed the first SPIs checklist.
«This checklist - Toran Explains - provides a solid framework for defining open science communication excellence, and can be applied to science journalism, science communication, institutional communication, public participation in science and RRI, social media, video and communication visual».
From ethics to newsworthiness, from impact to engagement. The ENJOI SPIs aim at helping find a way in the infodemic science communication is facing today.
«In the next step of the project, we will improve the SPIs to make them as useful as possible and develop a final list», Toran concludes.
The VIII Congress of Social Communication of Science (CCSC21) in Barcelona was organized by the Spanish Association of Scientific Communication (AEC2), the Center for Science, Communication and Society Studies of the Pompeu Fabra University (CCS-UPF) and the “la Caixa” Foundation, with the collaboration of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) – Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Catalan Association for Scientific Communication (ACCC) and The Conversation España.
The next edition will be held in 2023 in Granada, under the slogan “Communicating science in the 21st century”.
