Elevating Scholarly Communication – Three trends that struck me at the SSP’s 44th annual meeting - Research Consulting

"The idea that academic research should have some form of impact – for example societal, economic or on regulation – has been around for a while. This is behind the very ethos of open access, but also shows as part of impact assessment exercises across the world (e.g. the Research Excellence Framework in the UK, the Strategy Evaluation Protocol in the Netherlands or the Excellence in Research for Australia). What surprised me at the SSP annual meeting was to hear the scholarly communication community talk about going beyond ‘just open access’, aiming to ensure that research is understood by a broader audience, including lay readers (Figure 1). This is no easy task – it requires science communication skills and, in particular, the ability to translate often complex and jargon-rich findings into high-level insights that don’t require two PhDs to be grasped....