NEWSERA was featured on the European Science-Media Hub, with a detailed article on the project and interviews to Rosa Arias, the Project Coordinator, and Cristina Luís.
The article gives an overview of the context of Citizen Science and the project objectives, describing NEWSERA as “an ambitious new project”.
Citizen science meets science communication
An ambitious new project aims to develop new ways of communicating about science through the growing army of people volunteering their time to take part in research.
on July 29, 2020Citizen science is a growing field where members of the public take part in scientific research. This is a broad area covering a range of levels of engagement, from being observers or funders to tagging pictures or collecting observations. Citizen science is viewed by the European Commission as an important part of democratising science and delivering the vision of ‘science for the people, by the people’.
Read the full article
The article is accompanied by the two interviews with Rosa Arias and Cristina Luís, with questions on the opportunities of Citizen Science as a field of research and the challenges and promises of NEWSERA. Both interviews are part of the European Science-Media Hub’s series A scientist’s opinion.
Why are you focussing on citizen science projects for NEWSERA?
Cristina Luís: We will be dealing with citizen science and science communication, how they interact with each other, how science communication can be improved through citizen science and how we can also improve science communication within citizen science projects. […] In fact citizen science has a lot of science communication. Since citizen science engages a lot of people, non-scientists, in their activities, we figured it was a good way of improving science communication and giving more accurate scientific information to non-scientists.
What are the big challenges that you will need to overcome?
Rosa Arias: We did a trial in our kick-off meeting in Barcelona and put together different communities for the first time. It was very interesting because it was obvious that the citizen science practitioners don’t know how to even reach journalists […]. We don’t know who we need to talk to if we want to promote the project, for example. It was also obvious that the science communicator communities didn’t know about citizen science projects or that they can gather interesting stories from them. So this is the challenge – to generate these dialogues because they have common interests and needs.
The European Science-Media Hub is a project of the European Parliament’s Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA). Its aim is to empower science journalism and promote evidence-based information for European citizens, against misinformaion and fake news.
