How is public policy shaped by research? How is the public already actively involved in science? How is research and scholarship taken up by the public? In today’s climate, it is more important than ever for universities and researchers to assert themselves in the public sphere in more purposeful ways. The President’s Dream Colloquium on Making Knowledge Public is part of that effort.

This July, ScholCommLab’s Stefanie Haustein attended the sixth ever Brazilian Meeting on Bibliometrics and Scientometrics in Rio de Janeiro. In this short Q&A, she shares highlights from the event, including a keynote presentation about her work on Twitter and scholarly communication, connections with researchers from around the world, and a healthy dose of delicious Brazilian cocktails.

Why do we make bad political decisions, and how do we make better ones? On Thursday, June 21, ScholCommLabber David Moscrop will unpack these questions and more on the TEDxYYC stage. Drawing from his own and others’ research, as well as from his personal experiences as a media commentator, he’ll examine the way our current democratic system functions—or, rather, dysfunctions— and how it could be improved in the future.

Starting this week, ScholCommLab co-director Stefanie Haustein is publishing a series of guest posts on the Altmetric Blog about the role of Twitter in scholarly communication. Read on for a small taste of what to expect, and find the whole series at at altmetric.com/blog/. It’s almost been a decade since altmetrics and social media-based metrics were introduced.

Support for the open access movement has grown in recent years, and today more than a quarter of scholarly literature is freely available. Yet, despite years of advocacy work and countless policies and mandates promoting openness, the majority of researchers are still not compelled to make their research outputs publicly available. Why is this the case? What barriers stand in the way of creating real change?

From May 16 to 18, the ScholCommLab’s Research Associate Dr. Katherine Reilly and Carol Muñoz Nieves attended RightsCon Toronto, an international event that brought together policy makers, human rights advocates, business leaders, scholars, and others to tackle leading human rights issues in the digital age.

On May 2, ScholCommLab director Juan Alperin flew to Mexico City to attend the annual Congreso de Revistas, a three-day long event focused on Latin American scholarly publishing. The conference, which took place at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), brought together researchers, journal editors, students, and speakers from across the world to discuss the advancement of scientific publishing from the global south.

With more than 2.2 billion active users—six times as many as Twitter—Facebook is by far the largest social media platform on the web today. Yet despite its popularity, studies investigating Facebook sharing have reported surprisingly low levels of user engagement with scholarly research on the platform. Are Facebook users really sharing fewer academic articles than Twitter users?

Looking Ahead to SCW18’s “How I Scicomm” Panel What does it mean to be a science communicator in 2018?

Earlier this year, the ImpactStory team of Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem launched Unpaywall, a new browser extension that helps users find free, easy-to-access research. Since officially launching in April, Unpaywall has been installed by over 85,000 users who have collectively made over 75 million requests.