Pop science doesn't reach a "general audience"

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

A budding discipline around how science gets read and judged - Aris

Scholarly publishing spent thirty years arguing about access. It has barely begun arguing about what readers do with the paper once they have it. At Aris we call that second argument scholarly interface design. Mike Morrison's community calls it ScienceUX. Either way it is becoming a field, and here is why it is worth your attention.

The Problem With Promoting ‘Gold Standard Science’

Opinion | Branding scientific research with a simplified label risks misleading the public and harming scientific literacy.

science funding and the cherry picking problem

Science publishing–like all of science–requires money. There’s no getting around it, even with the open science movement. What appears free to many authors and readers still requires money and infr…

Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it

Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…

Everyone is a Strategist and No One is a Writer

From politics to culture, we face a crisis of cleverness and a society addicted to marketing

The Drain of Scientific Publishing

The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.

Technorealists, the silent majority? - open self

you might find yourself standing in the unremarkable center

Sciences perceived as precise and consensual are more trusted

Research focused on the United States shows that people’s trust in science varies considerably between disciplines. Existing explanations of these trust gaps stress the role of ideology: when people perceive scientists of a particular discipline to be ideologically like-minded, they tend to trust them more. Here, we report two findings: first, trust gaps between disciplines also exist in France—a representative sample of the French population (N = 1012) trusted researchers in biology and physics more than researchers studying climate science, economics, or sociology. Second, the more precise and consensual participants perceive scientific findings to be, the more they tend to trust the scientists (across and within disciplines). While these findings are correlational, they align with a non-ideological explanation of trust in science: the rational impression account. This account proposes that people can come to trust scientists by relying on basic cognitive inference processes, which tend to be generally rational.

A call for broadening the altmetrics tent to democratize science outreach

Common altmetrics indices are limited and biased in the social media that they cover. In this Perspective, we highlight how and why altmetrics should broaden its scope to provide more reliable metrics for scientific content and communication.

Technorealists, the silent majority? · Openness Praxis

you might find yourself standing in the unremarkable center