Milena Stanoeva
Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
SocialScienceSpace is launching a new podcast series called Social Science Bites on May 10. The series will feature interviews with prominent social scientists, including Danny Dorling, Richard Sennett, Rom Harre, Stephen Pinker, Angela McRobbie and Sonia Livingstone, with an aim to make social science research more publicly accessible and engaging.
Impact of Social Sciences published several notable blog posts on the importance of improving the ways in which we communicate research findings. Melissa Terras outlined the results of an experiment she conducted by blogging and tweeting about 26 of her open-access published journal articles. The results of her experiment demonstrate the importance of rethinking the accessibility of academic research and the ways in which it can be promoted to a wider audience through social media.
Alan Cann takes the idea of open-access research and social media in a different direction, arguing that moving the peer-review process online through platforms like blogs is a positive step for the research community, because it allows researchers to break out of academic silos and reach out to other disciplines, to publicly document the progression of their research, and to participate in a more transparent peer-review process.
Steve Johnson wrote about the special role that PhDs in government positions play in improving communications between researchers and policy-makers. Often acting as research managers, PhD holders in government offices are uniquely positioned to understand university research and relate to researchers as peers, while translating that research to policy-makers and communicating the needs of policy-makers to researchers.
Image courtesy of jjackowski on Flickr.