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7 principles for doing meaningful research communications

By Emilie Wilson , Vivienne Benson , Samantha Reddin , Ben O'Donovan-Iland , Annabel Fenton , Sophie Marsden , Roxana-Alina Vaduva and Alice Webb 25/02/2022

At IDS, we believe that evidence-based research plays a vital role in bringing about a more equitable and sustainable world. And to achieve this, we are committed to communicating research beyond academic audiences and journal articles.

However, we are very aware of the responsibility we have in shaping and delivering meaningful research communications. We are tackling complicated and sensitive issues and the communications process and content should reflect that. That is why we have developed 7 guiding principles to underpin our approach to research communications – throughout the lifetime of a project or programme.

1. Enabling

When it comes to engaging stakeholders and audiences in a targeted and meaningful way, the research team have relationships and networks beyond the reach of communications specialists, which need to be used. Researchers and partners share findings and messages at meetings and events, have one-to-one conversations and send direct communications, or engage with social media. These are all key communications tactics. Project support staff are also often heavily involved in engaging stakeholders and organising events. They can be seen as the ‘face’ of the project for partners, as a key point of contact.

Our role as communicators is to enable and facilitate our colleagues, partners, and networks to communicate in a way that fosters these important and individual relationships.

2. Context-specific

Most projects and programmes will set time and resources aside for scoping research questions in different contexts – be this geographical or sectoral. They will also ensure the right partners are on board with relevant local expertise. It is equally important to take this approach for successful research communications and uptake, for example looking at the media and social media landscape, mapping digital inequalities and internet penetration. There can be difficult dynamics to consider in many of the countries and settings in which we conduct our research. This can be a result of aid being increasingly targeted at fragile, violent or conflict-affected settings or the shrinking civic space.

Underpinning our work is a commitment to lead activities and work with partners to understand and remain up to date on ‘context’. This ultimately means that we create communications (often in partnership) that are sensitive to the different contexts and settings we navigate.

3. Targeted and agile

Understanding the ‘who’ is fundamental for reaching and delivering meaningful communications and engagement. Without that knowledge, we would only create general, or worse, irrelevant communications that don’t mean anything to our key stakeholders. We have connected the ‘targeted’ to keeping our communications ‘agile’ as we are committed to communications that are responsive to the times and to the needs of our stakeholders.

By embedding this approach in projects and programmes, research communications has much more impact and relevance to the context.

4. Creative

Creative communications is as simple as it sounds. It’s about keeping an open mind and identifying the approach, format and content for your communications that engages your target audience most effectively. This involves thinking not only about the content you create (i.e., through visual, digital and written) but also the spaces and ways in which you might share and engage.

Being creative in how we communicate leads to greater clarity in our messaging. It also means we are open to new and relevant opportunities that might be outside our usual approach. It also allows for flexibility and scope to bring in partners and key stakeholders into shaping our communications.

5. Data-driven

Data analysis is a key aspect of successfully communicating impact. It provides an accurate understanding of the outcomes of our communications, which helps the team make informed decisions and accurately shape communications throughout the lifetime of the project.

What can happen if you don’t take the time to analyse the impact of communications? The phrase ‘if you throw enough mud at a wall, some of it will stick’ comes to mind. Imagine that your research paper gets great engagement in Uganda – do you understand why it got engagement, who was reading it, and what they did after reading it? If you understand and document that, can you incorporate more of that into your communications approach going forward?

Data collation can range from social media metrics to engagement at an event, to testimonials. Without the proper tools and processes in place to analyse your data, you can lose on valuable opportunities to target content and drive more engagement.

6. Decolonised

When applied to development, a decolonial lens questions the underlying assumptions: that Western progress is aspirational, and that former colonies are ‘behind’ because they fall short in terms of mainstream socioeconomic indicators.

When it comes to communications, the same power hegemonies and assumed moralities influence how we communicate about (and communicate to) marginalised individuals, communities, countries, and regions. We are working towards decolonised communications by continuously questioning our approach, and ourselves: this includes being more conscious about asking who the right people are to do the communications, questioning what we show (vocabulary, images), how we put it together (our suppliers, who’s doing the talking), and who we are targeting (our audience, translation, and accessibility).

7. Accessible

Accessibility in communications is about inclusivity, making sure that everyone can access and understand research. Accessible communications encompass all media types and takes different forms depending on individual or group needs.

Accessible communication materials must be clear and understandable, easy to access and navigate, and respect people’s different needs. It is at the heart of aesthetics and design, and is included for all video, aural, digital, print and web media. People living with disability should, where possible, be involved in the production and delivery of communications materials, such as writing blogs or speaking at events; they should be heard and not spoken for.

We aim to review our accessibility methods on a regular basis to ensure they are working and improving; this includes getting feedback from people living with disabilities.

This article was first published on the IDS Opinions blog .

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Research To Action (R2A) is a learning platform for anyone interested in maximising the impact of research and capturing evidence of impact.

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Present or publish your research or creative activity, what is research communication.

"The ability to interpret or translate complex research findings into language, format, and context that non experts understand" (IDS 2011).

Research Communication

Research: Discovering new knowledge

Communication: The exchange of information

Research Dissemination vs. Research Communication: What is the difference?

Research communication incorporates the dissemination process but doesn't stop there! The process of tailoring your message for your audience is the hallmark of effective research communication .

Why should Research Communication matter..

Professional development

Improved communication skills

experiencing the real world of researching as well as presenting 

To the general public:

Improve the quality of life

Help with miscommunication and misconceptions

Increase interest and participation in the research field especially in the underrepresented social groups

To the research community:

Increase knowledge and further implement research in the future

Strong impacts in the research and science fields

Lead to new collaborations

The 7 C's of Communication

A checklist for communication:

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Effectively Communicating Research

Intensive course designed to provide researchers with the skills necessary to express their science clearly to diverse audiences

For more information:

Course goals.

• Understand how and why to effectively communicate your research through a variety of platforms.
• Understand the structure of content that is appropriate and how to achieve the highest quality for each mode of scientific communication.
• Learn how to make written and graphic content more accessible and engaging.
• Know how to deliver oral presentations effectively with diverse audiences and settings.
• Learn approaches to request and respond to feedback from mentors, colleagues, and external reviewers.

How do you effectively draft your scientific message so that it has the optimal chance to be accepted for publication? How do you communicate your science in an oral presentation? How much text is appropriate for a poster? What are some guidelines and tips for dealing with the media? Communication is an essential part of your research and a crucial component for a successful career as a researcher.

Effectively Communicating Research  is a two-day, intensive course offered by Harvard Catalyst. The course is designed to provide fellows and junior faculty with the skills necessary to express their science clearly to diverse audiences; to prepare abstracts, manuscripts, and posters, and to speak effectively.

With the guidance and expertise of the course faculty, including journal editors and leading scientists, participants will acquire the tools necessary to convey their science effectively.

Session dates

November 14 & 16, 2022

Time commitment

Participants accepted into the course must commit to fully participate in two days of the course.

As long as public health conditions permit, we will be running this event in-person , on the Harvard Medical School campus.  Participants will be required to follow all Covid-19 guidelines outlined by Harvard Medical School.

Fellows and junior faculty who are in the process of writing for publication or creating communication materials for scientific oral or poster presentations.

We believe that the research community is strengthened by understanding how a number of factors including gender identity, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, culture, religion, national origin, language, disability, and age shape the environment in which we live and work, affect each of our personal identities, and impacts all areas of human health.

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• MD and/or PhD (or equivalent) involved in medical research
• Fellows and Junior Faculty

Free for Harvard-affiliated  schools and  institutions.

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The Harvard Catalyst Education Program is accredited by the Massachusetts Medical Society to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

Harvard Catalyst Education Program’s policy requires full attendance and the completion of all activity surveys to be eligible for CME credit; no partial credit is allowed.

Harvard Catalyst Postgraduate Education is dedicated to addressing equity and intersectionality in medicine. Race, ethnicity, age, and sex can impact how different people respond to the same intervention. Diversity of thought and perspectives through the lens of a participant’s background contributes to an enhanced course experience, improved research and development, and overall better medical devices. The benefits of bringing more seats to the table extends far beyond this course. With this in mind, ECR is intentionally reserving space for applicants from historically excluded communities to attend the course.

The application process is closed. Please check back for future opportunities.

GatherContent is becoming Content Workflow by Bynder. Read More

Communicating research and its impact through content

Alexander Buxton

Head of strategic communications at the university of oxford, 7 minute read.

Interviewed by:

Table of contents

Collaborate

How to bring people together around digital projects.

Ellen de Vries

Brand and Content Strategist

Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. Communications professionals and organisations producing research increasingly face the need to find creative ways to integrate their scientific achievements with their content strategy.

Effective science communication is particularly complex. It is highly dependent on what is being communicated, its relevance to those participating in the conversation, in addition to the social and media dynamic around the issues being addressed. This makes getting it right and deriving lessons that can be applied across issues and contexts particularly challenging.

This article aims to provide insights into the following questions:

What is research communication and why is it important?

What makes good research communications content.

• What is the future of research communications and where are we heading?

Five tips for communicating research and impact

Impact, outreach and research communications have become buzzwords in the higher education landscape where universities and researchers must deliver impact, engage with enterprise, and communicate their research to broader audiences.

In fact, plans for effective research communication are now required in many research funding applications. Additionally the Research Excellence Framework (REF), is looming in 2021, this is the system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. Universities who aren’t communicating their research effectively could miss out on government research funding and the top spots in university rankings.

There is increasing pressure for universities to tell the innovation stories of their technology transfer, start-ups, spin-outs and the commercialisation of their research while simultaneously highlighting the opportunities for training and mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs who will drive those new technologies forward.

If organisations hit the sweet spot when it comes to communicating their research achievements and activity, it can have a number of tangible business benefits. It can also positively grow their reputation and even influence policy decisions for the betterment of economies, societies and humanity. 

Research communications is a skilled activity addressing a range of audience groups. The skills and abilities to interpret complex findings and distill them into usable information for non-experts without over simplification and ‘dumbing down’, are essential for your content to engage these audiences.

To achieve results that further goals and objectives there are many factors to consider, most important is ensuring your content is relevant to your audience . Your audience will want to know how the research is useful to them or how it could change the lives of their constituents, readers and viewers.

When crafting the message, it is useful to keep in mind your objective – what you want to get across to the audience, the relevance – what does the audience want to know about this story and clarity – what could this audience get wrong unless you stress the right information.

Timing is also key. There can be a temptation to communicate when findings are ready to share and when it is convenient to do so, but information that is relevant to these audiences is best communicated when they are ready and willing to listen.

There are a raft of content formats available to deliver research communications ranging from:

• Press releases
• Case studies
• Podcasts and videos
• Events, briefings and exhibitions

The audiences for research communications vary depending on the type of research but tailoring the message, content, channel and timing can be crucial to reaching them. Potential audience groups identified in the Department for International Development (DFID)’s working paper Research Communication Insights from Practice include;

Researchers who are involved in similar areas of study and research, who may well use and develop research findings further and then pass them on.

Research organisations and educational institutions which can encourage their staff and students to engage, analyse and discuss issues around the relevance and impact of research findings.

Intermediaries such as Non Governmental Organisations (NGO’s) play a key role in reaching policy makers when research findings are processed into policy briefings and similar outputs.

Funding agencies, research councils, charities and major donors have the power to provide crucial financial support to universities and research projects.

Industry decision makers and industrial scientists are key users of research who can facilitate collaborative projects on real world problems and often funding. ‍ Influencers include the traditional media and digital publishers who can reach out to a much wider audience.

The future of research communications

Looking at some of the wider trends in communications identified in the Reuters News Institute for the study of journalism’s report: Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2020 it is clear that technology advances will present opportunities for content creators and research communicators.

The report identifies that better, more immersive, feature-rich headphones (e.g. AirPod Pro and similar devices) will prove to be a big tech hit this year, giving a boost to audio formats like podcasts. Transcription and automated translation will be some of the first AI-driven technologies to reach mass adoption, opening up new frontiers and opportunities.

It also suggests that thanks to 5G rollout, faster and more reliable smartphone connectivity, will make it ever easier to access multimedia content on the go. Advances in technology will soon enable AI driven news pages to be tailored to visitor interests, presenting yet more opportunities to reach intended audiences. 

Looking more closely at crafting research communications the Pew Research Center performed a study on ‘ the science people see on social media ’ across 30 science related social media pages with between 3 million and 44 million followers. Here’s what they found: New scientific discoveries are covered in 29% of the posts on these pages. Fully 21% of posts featured the practical applications of science information, framed as “news you can use.” Another 16% of posts were promotions or advertisements for media or events and 12% of posts were aimed at explaining a science-related concept.

Throughout the study, video was a common feature of the most highly engaging posts whether they were aimed at explaining a scientific concept, highlighting new discoveries, or showcasing ways people can put science information to use in their lives. 

Here are some examples of some great research communications video content that;

1.   Feature interesting people

2.   Do the unexpected

3.   Simplify the science

4.   Use wonder

5.   Make researchers the hero

6.   Make it relatable

7.   Make it shareable

The timing, content type and quality of the science may not be the only factors that influence decision making. There is a need to make existing information more accessible and to analyse and synthesise research to provide tailored content.

There is also a need for more harmonised and effective communication of research across institutions using agreed language, tools and standards.

Ultimately knowledge is power. It is important to remember the ability to communicate research findings should be regarded as a public good on par with creating new knowledge. Because, if pioneering research is able to solve a grand challenge facing people and planet, but nobody knows about it, how can it help? 

• Know your audience, focus and organise your information for them
• Focus on the big picture such as the major ideas or issues the work addresses 
• Avoid jargon, try to avoid technical terms and keep the language simple
• Try to use metaphors or analogies to everyday experiences that people can relate to
• Underscore how the research can be applied or how it can inform effective policy making

The research landscape can be complex but if done correctly, conveying the benefits to society of research, teaching and innovation can be particularly rewarding for organisations, researchers and communications professionals. 

Webinar Recording

Clarity in higher education: every written word represents your brand, watch this webinar to learn how to create information about your university that is clear, concise, and credible. including: how to create policies, disclosures, and other non-marketing content that is easy for students, faculty, or the public to understand., june 4, 2020.

About the author

Alexander Buxton is a communications strategist and consultant with over ten years experience in communications roles within the public and the private sector. Through speaking, writing, and training programs he offers insights into contemporary issues in content strategy, content creation, and communication technology.

Alex is Head of Strategic Communications at the University of Oxford. Prior to joining the Public Affairs Directorate at Oxford, Alex spent two years as a senior advisor for global branding and communications working with universities in the Middle East, three years leading on research communications for the University of Warwick and five years implementing communications strategy with UK emergency services and the private sector. He has related qualifications from Oxford Brookes University, the Chartered Institute of Marketing and the Yale School of Management.

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn , Twitter @ADBComms or at alexander-buxton.com

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Research for Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences pp 159–187 Cite as

Communicating Research Findings

• Rob Davidson 5 &
• Chandra Makanjee 6  
• First Online: 03 January 2022

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Research is a scholarship activity and a collective endeavor, and as such, its finding should be disseminated. Research findings, often called research outputs, can be disseminated in many forms including peer-reviewed journal articles (e.g., original research, case reports, and review articles) and conference presentations (oral and poster presentations). There are many other options, such as book chapters, educational materials, reports of teaching practices, curriculum description, videos, media (newspapers/radio/television), and websites. Irrespective of the approach that is chosen as the mode of communicating, all modes of communication entail some basic organizational aspects of dissemination processes that are common. These are to define research project objectives, map potential target audience(s), relay target messages, define mode of communication/engagement, and create a dissemination plan.

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Davidson, R., Makanjee, C. (2021). Communicating Research Findings. In: Seeram, E., Davidson, R., England, A., McEntee, M.F. (eds) Research for Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79956-4_7

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The Future of Research Communication

1 Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital, US

Anita De Waard

2 Elsevier Labs – Jericho, US

Ivan Herman

3 W3C/CWI – Amsterdam, NL

Eduard Hovy

4 University of Southern California – Marina del Rey, US

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 11331 “The Future of Research Communication”. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together researchers from these different disciplines, whose core research goal is changing the formats, standards, and means by which we communicate science.

1 Executive Summary

Philip E. Bourne

Robert Dale

Anita de Waard

David Shotton

© Philip E. Bourne, Tim Clark, Robert Dale, Anita de Waard, Ivan Herman, Eduard Hovy, and David Shotton

Research and scholarship lead to the generation of new knowledge. The dissemination of this knowledge has a fundamental impact on the ways in which society develops and progresses, and at the same time it feeds back to improve subsequent research and scholarship. Here, as in so many other areas of human activity, the internet is changing the way things work: it opens up opportunities for new processes that can accelerate the growth of knowledge, including the creation of new means of communicating that knowledge among researchers and within the wider community. Two decades of emergent and increasingly pervasive information technology have demonstrated the potential for far more effective scholarly communication. However, the use of this technology remains limited; research processes and the dissemination of research results have yet to fully assimilate the capabilities of the web and other digital media. Producers and consumers remain wedded to formats developed in the era of print publication, and the reward systems for researchers remain tied to those delivery mechanisms.

Force11 (the Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship) is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in scholarly communication through the effective use of information technology. Force11 has grown from a small group of like-minded individuals into an open movement with clearly identified stakeholders associated with emerging technologies, policies, funding mechanisms and business models. While not disputing the expressive power of the written word to communicate complex ideas, our foundational assumption is that scholarly communication by means of semantically-enhanced media-rich digital publishing is likely to have a greater impact than communication in traditional print media or electronic facsimiles of printed works. However, to date, online versions of ‘scholarly outputs’ have tended to replicate print forms, rather than exploit the additional functionalities afforded by the digital terrain. We believe that digital publishing of enhanced papers will enable more effective scholarly communication, which will also broaden to include, for example, better links to data, the publication of software tools, mathematical models, protocols and workflows, and research communication by means of social media channels.

This document reports on the presentations and working groups that took place during the Force11 workshop on the Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in August 2011. More about Force11 can be found at http://www.force11.org . This document is structured as follows. Sections 3–5 report on the presentations of the participants. The presentations discuss, respectively, the past (Section 3), present (Section 4) and future (Section 5) of research communication. Section 6 presents the notes from the working groups. The notes are presented with only minor modifications, to capture the spirit of what was happening “in situ”. Section 7 lists the websites and other documents related to the workshop. Section 8 contains the timetable of the workshop. Finally, we list the participants of the workshop.

3 Overview of Talks. The Past

3.1 the future of research communications: the past.

Anita de Waard (Elsevier Labs – Jericho, US)

© Anita de Waard

URL http://slidesha.re/pkspZZ

To see where we need to go in the future, it can be useful to look at the past with a critical eye. For instance, the concept of hypertext: selecting portions of text and linking them to other portions of text, has been around, conceptually, since Vannevar Bush, and practically, since Engelbart’s 1968 seminal work. Yet apart from the web, which is a low-hanging fruit realisation of this idea – with only simple links that bring you to another page; not the conceptual networks that were originally conceived – the idea has never really come about, although it is reinvented with startling regularity. Why is this the case? We define four factors that contribute to a technology being accepted:

• Commercial support (e.g. Microsoft Word)
• Community uptake (e.g. LaTeX)
• Ease of use (e.g. the web)
• Academic Credit (e.g. grant proposals)

and discuss how these played a role for the topics discussed at Force11: New Formats, Research Data, Tools and Standards, Business Models, and Attribution and Credit.

3.2 Net-Centric Scholarly Discourse?

Simon Buckingham Shum (The Open University – Milton Keynes, GB) – twitter @sbskmi

© Simon Buckingham Shum

URL http://slidesha.re/qvoqoU

To make science and scholarship into a more agile sensemaking and problem solving system, better able to respond to the demands of a rapidly shifting environment, we need tools designed for an infrastructure unimaginable in the 17th Century when the first scholarly journals were born. However, the paradigm these established still dominates how we continue to disseminate knowledge. The founding fathers of hypertext, Vannevar Bush (1945) and Doug Engelbart (1963), clearly had the future of scholarly communication in mind when they presented use cases for their pioneering intellectual technologies. In this talk I will trace the core ideas which research since has sought to bring to reality. The essence of the idea is that scholarly communication is the crafting and contesting of networks of ideas, such as claims, concepts, evidence, arguments, and that linear prose is only one way in which to express knowledge. I will give a few examples of how new contributions to the long term reflective conversation of scholarly communication can now be made using the social, semantic web operating across many kinds of device.

3.3 A Brief History of E-Journal Preservation

David S. H. Rosenthal (Stanford University Libraries, US)

© David S. H. Rosenthal

URL http://blog.dshr.org/2011/08/brief-history-of-e-journal-preservation.html

Overview of the evolution of e-journal preservation from the initial Mellon Foundation projects to the present. How well did the various business models and technologies work? Where do the costs come from? What are the implications for the future?

4 Overview of Talks. The Present

4.1 open citations.

David Shotton (University of Oxford, GB)

© David Shotton

URL http://bit.ly/vnRNEQ

The Open Citations Corpus ( http://opencitations.net/ ) contains references to 3.4 million biomedical papers, representing 20% of all PubMed Central papers published between 1950 and 2010, and including all the highly cited papers in every biomedical field. The Open Citations web site provides access to the entire corpus with various search and browse options. The entire dataset is downloadable in various formats, including RDF and BibJSON, for reuse. Incoming and outgoing citation networks of selected references can be displayed in different ways and downloaded in various formats. The citation contexts of in-text citation pointers can be used to text mine the cited article and pull back sentences of relevance, to assist the reader in evaluating the quality of the citation and the cited article.

4.2 Scholarly Communication in the Present

Paul Groth (VU University Amsterdam, NL)

© Paul Groth

URL http://bit.ly/uHWmE9

Current scholarly communication practices can be broadly classified into four main categories: papers, professional meetings, databases, and informal communication. We briefly describe these categories to provide a picture of communication practice in the year 2011.

Papers are the predominate category of scholarly communication and still follow roughly the same form as for the past 200 years. Books and monographs take the role of papers in some disciplines. The Internet has changed the manner in which papers are distributed and managed. Digital libraries and search engines are the primary means to find papers in many disciplines. Social media is playing an increasing role in surfacing particular papers. Interestingly, papers are now often referred to, not by a citation, but using a URL of the paper on the Web. Papers are managed by specific reference management software. Publication of papers is still largely journal oriented and mediated through peer review and other editorial processes. Open access journals have become more common.

Professional meetings such as conferences, symposiums, and workshops play an important role as they provide forums for scientists to meet and discuss their latests findings and approaches without the lag of publication. This is particular important as research is often international in nature and thus requires face-to-face meetings. Increasingly, conferences leave traces on the Web through the posting of slides and other material as well as live conversations in social media.

Databases have become a primary mechanism for communicating results across scientific disciplines. Many journals in the life sciences, for example, require the deposition of data within on-line databases before a paper can be published.

Informal communication is an important part of the scholarly communication life cycle. The internet and in particular social media (blogs, microblogging, email forums) have become increasingly prevalent. However, the primary means of informal communication is email. Indeed, it can be safely said that email is the main means for scholarly communication today.

Finally, it is important to note that scholarly communication acts as one of a central proxy by which scientific performance is measured. Indeed, the publication of papers in journals is the single proxy often used and is often the basis for career advancement decisions.

While the Internet has changed the way scholarly communication is done. The journal paper still dominates as the primary trackable product of this communication.

4.3 What is holding us back? A short exploration of current impediments to integrated publishing of data and primary research

Fiona Murphy (Wiley-Blackwell, UK)

© Fiona Murphy

Others have also highlighted these points — towards promoting discussion. The issues/stakeholders are: Technology/systems, Funding bodies/mandates, Researcher behaviour, Publishers, Other.

• Tech/systems : People collect data ad hoc on laptops. Often not collected with the final deposit/site in mind so incurring expense and difficulty, Interfaces may be unhelpful (BADC), Formats issue — danger of outdated media.
• Funders : Historically unhelpful. Remote, not communicating or incentivising. Demanding compliance but not following through. In the process of changing gradually.
• Researchers : Suspicious of sharing IP/politics (Climategate), Anecdotally data underground/siege mentality, No time, Do not see benefits. There is a missing member of the team. Not trained.
• Publishers : Not facilitating — hesitant to invest do not see the benefits either, Used to dealing with libraries rather than end users, Locked into traditional mind-sets — incunabular, Not yet built expertise to required level, Partnerships unknown.
• Other : Confusion about where data should sit: who is responsible?

4.4 Making “Beyond the PDF” Current Practice

Philip E. Bourne (UC San Diego, US)

© Philip E. Bourne

URL http://www.slideshare.net/pebourne/dagstuhl

I report on my perspective as a computational biologists on what I consider major developments in scholarly communication that have happened in the past 7 months since the beyond the PDF workshop. Notable is the announcement of SciVerse from Elsevier which in my opinion has the potential to change the model for how we interact with scholarly content. I also describe my experiences and approach to the established notion of a data journal and how I propose to contribute. Finally, I describe recent experiences with workflows and my perceived impact that they might have on the reproducibility of science.

4.5 A (very) short history of the ADS

Michael J. Kurtz (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, US)

© Michael J. Kurtz

Main reference Michael J. Kurtz, “The Emerging Scholarly Brain,” in Future Professional Communication in Astronomy II, Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, 2011, Volume 1, pp. 23–35.

URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8369-5_3

The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System is a sophisticated digital library/ information system; it is used at least daily by nearly every astronomer. It was conceived in 1987, and came on-line in 1992. It is a central engine of astronomy’s large and complex information environment, linking together literature and data.

The ADS is in the process of a massive re-engineering. The prototype for the new system can be found at: http://adslabs.org/ui

4.6 How to communicate the data described in publications? The Dryad model

Todd Vision (University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, US)

© Todd Vision

Of the tens of millions of research articles that have been published, the underlying data for validation and reuse are available for only small fraction. This compromises the quality and credibility of science. To realise a world in which the publication of research data is customary, it will be necessary to adopt a multifaceted strategy. This includes technological innovations in data repositories, alterations to the landscape of researcher incentives, experimenting with new models of sustainability, and exploring new roles for publishers, learned societies, and funders. Leveraging the close relationship between research data and scholarly publication lessens these challenges, and we are experimenting with such a model in Dryad, a repository for data associated with articles in the basic and applied biosciences.

4.7 More than just data!

Cameron Neylon (Rutherford Appleton Lab. – Didcot, GB)

© Cameron Neylon

Much of the discussion of enhanced research communication turns on the availability of digital assets, mostly data, but with an increasing emphasis on software and workflows as well, and the exploitation of these assets to provide a rich media experience, enhanced functionality and discoverability or other benefits of online interactions. Less explored are the issues of how the data was collected, what the relevant physical artefacts are, and how best to capture the information on this in a useful way. As is also the case for effective data and digital process publication this requires systems that help the user to think about publication earlier than is traditional but there are unique challenges to capturing the record of physical processes and in particular the physical world provenance trail that leads to the first relevant digital artefact. This means that effective laboratory recording systems that enhance communication as opposed to just record keeping need to be built and configured in a way that makes those recording processes easy, automatically captures records of physical and digital artefacts via data model that can deliver immediate benefits to the user, but also renders the ultimate aggregation and collation of records into a useful form for communication easy as well. These challenges are not yet sufficiently addressed by the tooling that supports the capture and communication of digital research artefacts and processes.

5 Overview of Talks. The Future

5.1 the future. or: what i would like from publications of the future.

Eduard H. Hovy (University of Southern California – Marina del Rey/ISI, US)

© Eduard H. Hovy

URL http://bit.ly/t6N2NI

This talks presents the overall vision of the enterprise, which it defines as “To improve the communication of knowledge between scholars using new informatics technology”, and lists the general kinds of communicative services that a Publication of the Future (PoF) should provide. These include:

• Using terminology standards
• Automating access
• Reflecting the foundational theory and methodology
• Contextualising the work in relation to current world
• Using the best media at hand
• Exposing the reasoning
• Providing non-text info and tools

The talk illustrates each point with examples, taken from both the sciences and the humanities. It ends with a draft outline of the eventual report.

5.2 Introduction to the Future of Research Communication

Tim Clark (Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital, US)

© Tim Clark

URL http://www.slideshare.net/twclark/dagstuhl-future-sesssion-intro-slides

Research Communication exists in a complex web of technology, information, people and activities. It is currently in a transitional state between print media and Web media. A number of problems are posed for its future development. These include research reproducibility and data provenance, interoperability, dealing with masses of data on previously unknown scales, algorithmic assistance to readers, and in general dealing with the issue of volume of publications, which is intractably large for even highly specialized disciplines.

Technological solutions alone will not be sufficient. The most productive solutions to these and other problems will adopt the “ecosystemic” perspective. They will emphasize the interaction of technology, information, and social formations in mutually beneficial ecosystems, or more correctly, “activity systems”, in which value chains are built and sustained for participants from multiple interacting disciplines and communities.

5.3 Networked Knowledge

Stefan Decker (National University of Ireland – Galway, IE)

© Stefan Decker

A new publishing paradigm as a social-technical system. A first approach to the necessary infrastructure for Networked Knowledge – initial ranking, abstractions and access mechanisms.

5.4 The Execution of Dave 2.0

David De Roure (University of Oxford, GB)

© David De Roure

URL http://www.myexperiment.org/packs/206.html

What happens when there are millions and millions of executable papers, sitting there and executing away…? “Executable journals” are a step towards this vision – a world of inter-related executable papers, in an altered ecosystem of scholarly publishing with new intermediaries like observatories and a new role for existing intermediaries like libraries and publishers. What will that world be like? It will help us do science-on-demand (“press this button to re-run your thesis”), and equally the papers can process new data autonomously, generating new results which in turn get processed by other papers. You’ll receive an email notification when the paper you wrote five years ago is re-run with new inputs from other people’s papers, and so will the people who used yours. Automated execution assists curation and indeed validation and quality checking – and whatever replaces peer review as we know it. Is this crazy or inevitable? The co-evolutionary design of the myExperiment website ( http://www.myexperiment.org ) for sharing computational workflows gives us as glimpse into this world of executable “Research Objects”, which is being further developed under the Wf4Ever project.

5.5 “Towards Horizons 2020” — The Framework Programme for Research and Innovation 2014 to 2020 and Role of scientific data

Mike W. Rogers (European Commission Brussels, BE)

© Mike W. Rogers

Europe’s aim to be the leading knowledge based economy will be supported by the new Framework Programme. The development of the specific programme will be an outcome of intensive public debate and stakeholder participation, based on a number of guiding principles which are rapidly emerging after the first wave of consultations:

• Strong support for bringing research and innovation together in an integrated funding programme.
• Simplification is a key priority for all stakeholders.
• All stages in the innovation chain should be supported, with more attention for close to the market activities (e.g. demonstration, piloting).
• Continuity for the successful elements of current programmes, e.g. European Research Council, Marie Curie, collaborative research.
• EU funding should be tied closely to societal challenges and EU policy objectives (climate change, ageing, energy security, ...).
• More openness and flexibility is needed, less prescriptive calls, better use of bottom-up instruments (also in programme parts guided by clear policy objectives).

The presentation developed the rationales and scope of the various consultations in order to enable participants to better understand the future roadmaps for European Research Models where the connectivity from research to Innovation will be addressed systemically. More specifically, the current consultation on the future of Scientific Data was presented and a number of themes highlighted which the Workshop could develop as a core to its response to the European Commission, both as individuals, as representatives of organisations and as a body of expertise in its own right.

6 Working Groups

The seminar participants formed several working groups that tried to focus on various issues related to the future of research communication and e-scholarship. This section presents the notes of these groups. Note that since the working groups took place in parallel, there was no single terminology: for instance, digital artefact, research object, publication of the future are likely to have the same meaning. The seminar participants agreed to publish a white paper based on these notes (see Force11 white paper in Section 7).

This group aimed at brainstorming on the main issues related to the creation and publishing of data. Below we include the list of main questions raised during the discussion. More notes can be seen at http://bit.ly/usiQOE .

• How much does the research domain matter when thinking about new publication forms?
• How do we effectively collaborate?
• We need to formulate use cases, we could generate a vision on what happens if we put all this together
• What we are already doing in this community to improve scientific publishing and what could we do next?
• Should we aim to be contagious? People can register and share their things
• How can we maximise the input and first pass of information curation?
• What is the role of curators to validate NLP results?
• How rapid should be the science production loop, from data to publication to science communication? There is a pre- and post- publication aspect, the quicker a publication can be devolved the faster is the impact on people citing that data.
• What would researchers need to know from others?
• Sharing is a bottleneck: scientists are not available to share they are fine to collaborate and publish but not sharing, because there is no recognition and there are potentially negative effects. There is no policing and penalty.
• We need funding bodies and journals to penalise those who do not share
• We can invent mechanism to detect who does not share, i.e if a pub derives form a work it is not collaborative, probably it does not connect to the other research artefacts out there
• We do not have a good value proposition: reservation for self use
• Knowing what I have in my lab
• Recovery and archive of data, plus access control to data
• Productivity, I want to be helped into publishing more
• How do we make the literature more effectively used
• People do not like paper summarisation, they do not trust the conceptual model presented they think it is limited
• There is no accreditation for doing annotation, knowledge curation or any king of paper summary
• What are the incentives we propose for doing this activities?
• Would be good knowing what the most relevant paper are

6.2 Tools and Technologies

This group aimed at organising and predicting the requirements of tools and technologies for Scholarly Communications. This group was made up of: Carole Goble (chair), David De Roure, Anna De Liddo (notes), Phil Bourne, Paolo Ciccarese, David Shotton, Herbert Van de Sompel, Tim Clark, Gully Burns, Udo Hahns. Below we include the list of main discussion items. The list of tools and notes are available at https://sites.google.com/site/futureofresearchcommunications/force11-tools-framework and the participants hope to put there a systematic profiling of the tools later.

What are the communication artefact we use in science?

What are the communication functionalities and their integration?

What is the lifecycle of Digital Artefact?

The lifecycle of a Digital Artefact includes the following stages:

• Registration
• Certification
• Enactment of the Digital Artefact: presentations, videos
• Discoursing
• Reuse/reproduceable
• Formal/informal
• Granularity of publications

How would you alter these tools so that they may become more valuable for the publication lifecycle?

What are the main categories of tools for supporting the entire lifecycle of scientific publication?

Tools that deal with the Digital Artefact and that are used formally and informally to support the lifecycle. There is also another dimension that is the speed of production of Digital Artefact and their development, including the issue of granularity of Digital Artefact.

What are the main tools in place now to support the entire lifecycle of scientific communication?

• Literature programming
• Scientific publication
• Spreadsheets
• Reference management system
• Web pages + Web sites
• Word/LaTeX Google docs
• Supercomputing
• Digital library
• Analysis workflow + R scripts, codes
• Amazon for papers/books
• Catalogues: s/w library, N/F, Yellow pages
• Recordings/broadcast/webinars of talks and presentations
• Dropbox/SlideShare/Flickr/Twitter
• Terminologies, thesauri, mapping, ontology
• Search services
• Analytical tools to survey the landscape, understand the science landscape, i.e mapping and research literature mapping (Compendium, Cohere, knowledge mapping tools)
• Technologies thesauri
• Hubs for communication: centres of communities (automated versions of it)
• What are the more formal tools
• EasyChair: Conference reviewing tools
• Grant repositories/applications: generating documents
• Database schema, data repositories
• Google+, Facebook, social networks
• Learned society
• Conference call (Skype)
• Directories of WhoIs/yellow pages

How can these tools be categorised?

• Social Technologies
• Info tech-tool

Off the shelf: What is different in how those tools are used in scholarly communication, compared to other forms of informal communication?

What needs to be added to make of this tools recognised scientific tools: i.e., so that tweets on the last paper you published would be considered by your boss

• Self-promotion
• Conference reporting
• Community intelligence
• Data observations, cities sensors
• Reluctant to negative critics
• View data in real-time
• Easy data maintenance

What are the properties necessary to move a tool from formal to informal tool for scientific communication/publishing?

• Citeability
• Preservation
• Highly shareable
• Known provenance
• Accessibility
• Granularity
• Cost (or lack of it)
• IP restrictions
• Inherent rewardability
• Annotatabilility
• Protectability
• Staking claims
• Portability
• Palpability
• Multimediality

What are the categories of tools that are emerging?

• Communication Instant Discourse
• Training tools
• Document composition, editing, authoring
• Sensemaking
• Scientific publication/research sharing
• Preservation/storage
• Presentation
• Search tools
• Digital artefact/file sharing
• Terminology services
• Curation: metadata/indexing/managing tools
• Certification tools and commenting
• Execution tools

What are the Media Types of Digital Artefacts?

• To be continued...

Back office

• Identifiers
• Interoperability and best practices
• Capability matrix: a map of the skills and tools we have in the group, for understanding, when I need something, what are the interoperability conventions between the tools
• Machine actionability
• Economic sustainability and community involvement (SWAT analysis)
• Problem of VERSIONING at all layers (FLUX) – What is the CONTRACT OF INTER-OPERABILITY SERVICES? What is the change protocol/standards of a tool? What is the contractual cleanliness and coherence of the tool? (Within the group)
• Making use of cutting edge computer science technologies

6.2.1 Actionable recommendations to

6.2.1.1 funders, policy makers and reviewers of projects.

• Reward the funding of tweaks recomposition and interoperability of already existing software. Reward REUSE and REPURPOSE
• Proactively identify missing components and services that proposals should be focusing on. Assess risk. Do not leave all to market!
• Software sustainability
• Putting all the recommendations in an e-infrastructure policy document
• Specific fund archives (AHRC counter example)
• Citation effort
• Best strategies models for assessing the success of scholarly communication
• Identify the obstacles to scholarly communication

6.2.1.2 Scholars

• Put your data in a open repository and cite it and include it in your CV
• Promote tools and propagate practice to scholars
• Get your colleagues to do the same
• Complain and engage in the battle (senior scholars to advocate and promote sharing and defend young scholars that do that by rewarding them for doing that)
• Enlightenment

6.2.1.3 Publishers

• No walled gardens
• Metadata/splash pages should be open including references
• Allow open annotation schemes and name entities access
• Enable citeability of components
• Provide APIs and encourage developers to build applications
• Provide a unified standards
• Exposing content for text mining
• Embrace linked data
• Expose item level download data

Following these recommendations will drive better bigger and access to scholarly contents.

6.2.1.4 Technology developers

• Place your software in the Force11 roadmap and framework at at https://sites.google.com/site/futureofresearchcommunications/force11-tools-framework
• Reuse of existing components and standards
• Collaborate to develop new components that do not exist yet
• Place your software in the value chain of improving research and science communication
• Encourage “enlightened self-interest” in your users

6.2.2 Vision: Making scholarship useful and usable

An interoperable serviced based ecosystem of sustainable core components as the basis for a healthy, innovative and vibrant market of interoperable and usable tools fit for scholarship in the 21st century. These tools and technologies will exploit the full potential of information and communication technologies to serve and not hinder scholarship, thus improving the quality and productivity and dissemination of research. This ecosystem will provide a basis for more rapid and cost-effective innovation of software for scholarship.

6.2.3 Questions raised during the discussion

• How do we collaborate effectively?
• How we relate the kind of tool we have and integrate them so that scientists can play with them?
• We need to formulate a use cases, we could generate a vision on what happen if we put all these things together
• What we are already doing in this community to improve scientific publishing and what we could do next?
• How do we maximise the input and first pass of information curation?
• How do we have researchers buying in new ways of publishing?
• We should aim to be contagious? People can register and share their things
• Issues of time
• How rapid should the science production loop be, from data to publication to science communication?
• There are pre- and post- publication aspects, the quicker a publication can be devolved the faster is the impact on people citing that data.
• What do researchers would need to know from others?
• What are the bottlenecks of open science
• Sharing is a bottleneck: scientists are not available to share, they are fine to collaborate and publish but not share, because there is no recognition and there are potentially negative effects. There is no policy and penalty
• We need funding body and journals that penalise those who do not share
• We can invent mechanism to detect who does not share, i.e if a publication derives from a work which is not collaborative, probably, it does not connect to the other research artefacts out there
• We do not have a good value proposition: reservation for self use, knowing what I have in my lab
• What do scientists need?
• How do we make the literature more effectively used, and how we make people understandable and useful to them.
• There are no credits for doing annotation, knowledge curation or any kind of paper summary
• What are the incentive we propose for doing this activities?
• Information complexity I want to be helped to read the right papers in the right (also interdisciplinary thing)
• Would be good knowing what the most relevant paper are.

6.3 Business models for the research communications in the future

This group aimed at brainstorming on possible business models for the research communication, taking into account the changes happening in scholarly publishing nowadays. This group included the following participants: Bradley P. Allen (notes), Aliaksandr Birukou, Philip E. Bourne, Leslie Chan, Olga Chiarcos, Robert Dale, Eve Gray, Paul Groth, Ivan Herman, Eduard H. Hovy, Fiona Murphy, David S. H. Rosenthal (chair), Jarkko Siren. Below we reproduce the summary of the discussion (also found at http://bit.ly/tyaWcL ). More notes can be found at http://bit.ly/usiQOE .

Building a sustainable approach to research communications of the future will require the exploration of the space of potential business models. By business model, we mean a conceptual description of how an organisation provides value to customers — and gets paid for doing so. This last consideration of describing how the money flows is key to understanding and resolving the sustainability and access issues that dog the ecosystem of researchers, institutions, publishers and funding agencies today.

In keeping with the ideas discussed at the Workshop about the future of research communications, the group focused on the notion of the research object as the contained of information being communicated. A research object is composed of one or more of the following types of sub-objects:

• Documents (textual, multimedia, pictures, etc)
• Experimental data
• Methods and procedures
• Relationships among constituents
• Context metadata
• Asset metadata
• Relational metadata

The group used the Business Model Generation [2] methodology to describe the space of potential business models for research communication in the future. Specifically we developed a set of optional choices for elements of the nine components of a Business Model Canvas [1]. These are:

• Value Propositions: What value is being delivering to the customers?
• Customer Segments: Who pays for that value?
• Channels: How is this value delivered to the paying customers?
• Customer Relationships: How is the relationship with the customers managed, and by whom?
• Revenue Streams: In what ways do customers pay us for this value, and optionally, how much?
• Key Resources: Who and/or what is required to build and operate the systems and organisations need to deliver the value?
• Key Activities: What tasks need to performed to deliver the value to the customers?
• Key Partners: Who are the key partners needed for the organisation to be able to deliver value?
• Cost Structure: What costs does the organisation incur to operate and deliver the value?

Table 1 illustrates the sketch of the business model designed during the working group.

A sketch of the business model in Business Model Canvas format.

6.4 Assessment and Impact

This group aimed at identifying the critical issues pertaining to the research assessment and impact. The following people took part in this group: Eve Gray, Laura Czerniewicz, Ivan Herman (chair), Herbert van den Sompel (notes), Michael Kurtz, Jarkko Siren, Peter van den Besselaar, Anita de Waard. Below we include the list of main issues discussed. More notes can be seen at https://sites.google.com/site/futureofresearchcommunications/contributions-1/contributions .

6.4.1 Opening statements

• Current assessment mechanism is counter productive to scholarly communication. Need to make policy makers realise and accept that. Only formal citations count. Not other impact.
• What is impact assessment? Assess based on what? Do we need assessment of individuals?
• Impact factor doesn’t work for across disciplines. Metrics on people or on artefacts?
• Perspective should be about value and how value relates to business and impact. Measure value! But how?
• Scholarly communication system is skewed by impact assessment as it is.
• The system is counter productive. But measures are essential because of assessing individuals, setting funding policy. Question how to come up with other metrics that can be generated in an open and scaleable way. Question how to get those metrics accepted.

6.4.2 Questions raised

• Do institutions, funding agencies base decisions on impact factor? Not element in decision whether a project gets funded, but does it play role in setting funding policies?
• Do we need to also talk about e.g. service to community as part of assessment? Is that science communication?
• What are metrics to assess research communication system, rather than to assess individuals?

6.4.3 Issues

• Need a multidimensional metrics model to count various things. If possible, the model should apply across disciplines. Simplicity of metric is important.
• What are those new dimensions? Is Altmetrics an answer?
• Africa can not publish in ranking journals even if paper is about millions of people dying of some disease
• The way we conducts science has changed so fundamentally that a metrics mechanism that ignores this change is totally passe
• Real impact is manifested in different ways now (e.g., we know who the core players are in a scientific community and that is not based on “objective” metrics)
• The stellar researchers are known by their community. All the others not necessarily. Metrics can help.
• Innovations systems thinking. Research => Patent => Commercial. Need to change that thinking.
• Accessibility of metrics (or data from which to derive metrics) across systems is big issue, e.g. download data not consistently available; API to obtain metric only allows limited amount of calls a day.
• Author disambiguation – ORCID?
• Reputation management
• Need to define output types and metrics for output types

6.4.4 Possible dimensions

• How do we measure how research contributes to society (e.g., development goal in Africa)
• Netherlands: “evaluate research in context” effort. Quality of communication between research and community at large determines societal impact.
• local versus global impact
• economical impact
• quality of communication to general public
• measures depend on goals. In many cases citations are good. But, for example, in nursing, readership becomes important.
• need to be able to get at metrics otherwise you have done nothing
• download counts (better to measure social impact). Can be gamed. Can use under right conditions.
• crowd sourcing evaluation (e.g. Faculty of 1000)
• used for teaching (knowledge with of being transferred)
• used in lectures
• general level of reuse

The problem we see with Impact Factor and other simple metrics are individually taken with grain of salt. But if we would use multiple dimensions we might get a more just system. Decisions makers may choose which dimensions to use.

A Wordle map from the notes of day 1 represents the most frequent keywords mentioned in the discussion

Seminar 15.–18. August, 2011 – www.dagstuhl.de/11331

1998 ACM Subject Classification H.2.8 Database Applications, H.3 Information Storage and Retrieval, H.5 Information and Interfaces and Presentation, I.7.4 Electronic Publishing, J.7 Computers in other Systems, K.4 Computers and Society

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A cover letter is required for consideration for this position and should be attached as the first page of your resume. The cover letter should address your specific interest in the position and outline skills and experience that directly relate to this position.

As one of the nation's leading public research universities, discoveries and innovations led by the University of Michigan address emerging challenges, spur new technologies, improve quality of life, strengthen communities and create economic opportunities. The Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) works closely with faculty, staff and students from across the three U-M campuses to catalyze, support and safeguard research and creative practice in ways that serve the public and advance the university's vital mission.

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Exploring the humanities at Tyson Research Center

Performance, two-day gathering highlight critical and creative practices

Listening is a fundamental human capacity. It also can be a skill, an artistic practice and even a political act.

So argues Anya Yermakova , an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Sound can permeate walls,” said Yermakova, a composer, dancer and sound artist as well as a historian and philosopher of logic. “Sighted humans tend to be visually dominant. Sound can go through and around the structures that people build to divide space.”

This spring, Yermakova is organizing a pair of performances, on April 14, and a two-day gathering, on April 26-27, at WashU’s Tyson Research Center . The events build on her scholarship, her creative work and her current seminar, “Topics in Embodied Communication: Listening.”

That course — which is cross-listed in performing arts, music, comparative literature and philosophy-neuroscience-psychology, all in Arts & Sciences — explores the nature of human and non-human auditory systems, as well as multimodal forms of listening (such as vibration), through a variety of theoretical perspectives.

“The final section reflects on the political possibilities of sound,” she explained. “How do we listen to that which is invisible?”

Creative connections

Tyson is a 2,000-acre environmental field station located a half-hour southwest of St. Louis. “It’s a beautiful and fascinating site that has a real precedent of accommodating artistic research,” Yermakova said. “A lot of people at WashU — across different fields and different departments — have creative connections to Tyson.”

All events will take place in an unused World War II-era storage facility. “The bunkers are really interesting,” Yermakova said. “They were constructed into the landscape, presumably so that they wouldn’t be visible from aerial view. A lot of them don’t have electricity. Converting one into a concert venue has certainly been a challenge!”

The performances, titled “Listening Into: Bunkers, Bodies, In-betweens,” will feature a largely improvised program with Yermakova on piano and providing foot percussion. Joining her will be visiting artists Florent Ghys on acoustic bass and electronics, Marina Kifferstein on violin, and Rajna Swaminathan on mridangam and kanjira. But the audience will also contribute.

“The bunkers are so resonant that simply stepping inside makes a sound,” Yermakova said. “Anyone who enters the bunker is co-creating the soundscape.”

Artistic research

Both the performances and the gathering are part of the Center for the Humanities’ Redefining Doctoral Education in the Humanities, or “Ready,” initiative. Funded with support from the Mellon Foundation, this long-running series of grants, retreats, workshops and classes aims to support innovative, interdisciplinary graduate work and to encourage the next generation of humanities scholars and practitioners.

As part of “Artistic Research at Tyson,” more than a dozen graduate students, representing nearly as many Arts & Sciences departments and programs, will present works-in-progress based on their own critical and creative engagements with the Tyson site. Other participants will include Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Salomé Voegelin, professor of sound at the University of the Arts London. Themes will range from war, displacement and the power of erosion to land as an embodiment of memory and the entanglements of human and environmental forces.

“In the graduate community, there’s definitely interest in artistic research,” Yermakova said. “A lot of people are doing complementary work, but they may not know of one another, or they may still be looking, in some way, for a home. Does this count as research? Is this legible within the university?

“In a sense, Tyson seemed like a logical place to bring everyone together.”

Performances of “Listening Into: Bunkers, Bodies, In-betweens” will take place at 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Sunday, April 14. In addition, a discussion with the artists will take place at 3 p.m.; audiences from both performances are invited to attend. “ Artistic Research at Tyson” will take place from 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Friday, April 26; and from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday, April 27. For those unable to attend the full gathering, there will be a special “drop-in hour” from 1-2 p.m. Saturday, April 26.

All events are free and open to the public, but space is limited and RSVPs are required. Tyson Research Center is located about 20 miles from the Danforth Campus, just off Interstate 44. For more information, visit the individual event pages linked above.

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Research grant awarded to Communication Associate Professor

Monday, Apr 08, 2024 • Christy Brady : [email protected]

“I am thrilled to receive this NSF grant,” he said. “It enables an interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration to explore the impacts of neighborhood social and infrastructure networks on community well-being, particularly in underserved communities.” 

As co-PI, Dr. Su collaborates with a team of researchers from civil engineering, computer science, and behavioral science at SMU and Northwestern University to pioneer an interdisciplinary approach to address and mitigate inequities in neighborhood infrastructure, particularly in underserved communities. 

Their project aims to study how multilevel social and infrastructure networks in underserved communities impact community wellbeing, and how a holistic "complete-neighborhoods" approach can support equity-based policy and design to improve wellbeing in underserved communities. 

“As a social scientist, I look forward to contributing my expertise in social network analysis and organizational communication to a holistic approach that will inform equitable policy and design decisions to improve the physical, mental, and social well-being of residents in these communities,” Su said.

Upon the completion of this planning grant, Dr. Su and his team will pursue a multi-year Integrative Research Grant (IRG) from NSF's SCC program.

Elizabeth Newman, dean of the College of Liberal Arts said Dr. Su is deserving of the award. 

“Dr. Su is a fantastic educator and researcher. CoLA is thrilled to be able to assist him in continuing his research and excited to see the impact this project will have on wellbeing in underserved communities," she said.

Dr. Su received the inaugural TSFA (Time to Seek Funding or Awards) award from CoLA, which provided him with dedicated time in Spring 2023 to develop this successful grant proposal.

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Duke CNAP Welcomes First Speech-Language Pathologist

Duke’s Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program (CNAP) is set to welcome its first speech-language pathologist as a doctoral student. Shanika Phillips Fullwood , a clinically certified SLP with over a decade of experience, will begin her studies in the fall of 2024.

Her enrollment reflects a promising shift toward innovative, interdisciplinary approaches in brain and language research.

Phillips Fullwood works at Moses Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro, treating adult patients who have neurogenic disorders, associated with stroke, traumatic brain injury, and spinal cord injury. She serves as the acute rehab neuroscience diagnostic specialist, a role that involves coordinating with physical therapists, occupational therapists, and SLPs to ensure the use of evidence-based practices.

In addition to her clinical work, she is an adjunct lecturer at her alma mater, Brooklyn College, CUNY, and she contributes to research on neurogenic communication disorders in the lab of Jamila Minga, PhD, CCC-SLP . Phillips Fullwood’s work in the lab includes training undergraduates in transcription checks for the Right-Hemisphere Brain Damage (RHD) Bank and participating in brain mapping studies to identify regions associated with specific deficits.

She’s also co-authoring manuscripts focused on the impact of culture on communication and the development of a diagnostic code for apragmatism, work that aligns with her research interests.

As a doctoral student, Phillips Fullwood plans to focus on the cognitive aspects of communication, particularly how right-hemisphere strokes affect language and communication abilities. Her interest in this area developed during her time as an SLP in Indiana, where she encountered a number of patients with right-hemisphere strokes who had trouble with communication.

These patients struggled to stay on topic and understand questions, even though their language center – which is typically associated with the left hemisphere – was not affected.

“I would bring up these concerns during our interdisciplinary team meetings to the physical medicine doctor, and the response often was, ‘Well, they didn't have a left-hemisphere stroke, they had a right-hemisphere stroke, so they shouldn't have communication difficulties,’” she said.

This led her to delve deeper into the research to understand whether these kinds of communication deficits have been documented in the literature.

“There was some evidence supporting that, but still, there's a bias toward the left hemisphere being the only hemisphere that's responsible for communication,” she said. “I thought, ‘Well, it's time for me to go back and do my PhD,’ which was always my goal.”

Known for its interdisciplinary approach, CNAP provides students with the opportunity to engage with faculty across multiple departments and fields at Duke, such as neurobiology, psychology, psychiatry, biomedical engineering, and philosophy .

Students undergo 18 months of coursework and laboratory rotations, gaining foundational knowledge in cognitive neuroscience. After that, they select a department and two advisors to guide their thesis research, furthering their specific interests through an affiliate graduate program or department.

“The fact that CNAP is so interdisciplinary was really attractive to me,” Phillips Fullwood said. “I felt that this program would serve me a lot better than a PhD in communication sciences because I'll be able to tap into some of the techniques they're using in neuroscience to get a better understanding of the communication piece.”

Her enrollment in CNAP demonstrates the interdisciplinary approach necessary for advancing the field of cognitive neuroscience. It also highlights the opportunity to integrate speech-language pathology into Duke's broader research and academic offerings. Currently, the school does not offer a training program for communication sciences and disorders at the master’s or doctoral level.

Through her work, Phillips Fullwood hopes to help bridge the gap between clinical speech-language pathology and cognitive neuroscience in treating patients with right-hemisphere strokes who have communication deficits.

“ I believe that we must have a good understanding of why this patient is doing what they're doing to inform how we evaluate and treat them,” she said. “ If we improve this piece, then we'll be able to help translate that into better diagnostic tools, better assessment methods, and better, more formal ways for treating this than we currently have.”    

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• Disney And Warner Bros Vet John Rood Named Chief Brand & Communications Officer At Magid

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John Rood , a former longtime exec at Disney and Warner Bros , is joining consulting and research firm Magid as Chief Brand & Communications Officer.

Reporting directly to CEO Brent Magid, Rood will oversee brand strategy, product marketing, corporate communications, sales support, and events. He will be based in Magid’s Los Angeles office, often working out of the company’s offices in New York and Minneapolis.

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Rood joins Magid from his own marketing consultancy, where he has advised media companies, tech start-ups, agencies, and non-profits on strategy and business development. Previously, he served as SVP – Marketing, Disney Channel along with other marketing roles during a 15-year run at The Walt Disney Co. Prior to that, Rood spent 10 years at Warner Bros, rising to EVP – Sales, Marketing, and Business Development for DC Comics.

Rood “brings incredible expertise and experience that will help us serve our clients even better and supercharge the scale of our business,” Brent Magid said in the official announcement.

The company “Magid was a powerful partner of mine while I was at Disney/ABC Television, helping us devise winning strategies for a number of our businesses,” Rood said. “In the years since, I have witnessed the Magid reputation grow even further, in stature, in its product suite and in industries served. If ya know, ya know – brands who partner with Magid today are experiencing the very best combination: legacy credibility and modern innovation.”

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