4.2. Opening the windows of the ivory tower
Scientific outreach is an essential part of our work as emerging
scientists, and engaging with society improves the quality of both our
training and research. Engagement activities can include sharing science
on social media, writing policy briefings, working with not-for-profit
science education programs or developing relationships with local
stakeholders. Investing time into outreach activities can be beneficial
to ECR career development because it provides an opportunity to begin
developing working relationships with stakeholders as early as possible.
Building long-lasting involvement can help to address the lack of
continuity and disconnect between local communities, stakeholders and
scientists. Communicating scientific progress through media outreach can
also lead to recognition amongst peers, developing non-academic
networks, promoting scientific findings, and impacting policy making
(Lutz et al., 2018).
To achieve stronger communication and outreach strategies, ECRs should
leverage communication specialists at their institutions. Communication
training empowers researchers to build their communication skills, and
more effectively communicate the importance of their findings in a
meaningful and relatable way. Working with academia-partnered media
outlets such as The Conversation can also help scientists shape
how their results are communicated. Additionally, collaboration between
scientists, communication specialists, artists, and journalists should
be encouraged to create compelling scientific stories.
Communication, education, and outreach initiatives are becoming more
rewarded and formally recognized in the traditional academic framework
following the development of peer-reviewed science communication
journals such as Geoscience Communication (Illingworth et al.,
2018). To ensure that future hydrological research projects will be
clearly communicated and will address a societal need, the work of ECRs
needs to be evaluated beyond their number of publications.
Non-traditional metrics, such as altmetric (Priem et al., 2010), can be
used to quantify online interactions. Further development of metrics
that include impact and usefulness of research should be developed
(Lebel and Mclean, 2018).