Instagram, TikTok, Clubhouse: Today, researchers who want to share their work with non-academic audiences can choose between a vast array of digital platforms. Some of them vanish as quickly as they appear. Others attract an audience that is looking  for something other than scientific content.

Jayat Joshi An old yet powerful principle has emerged from the COVID-19 crisis. It was introduced to the West in the writings of Carl G. Jung, and has its roots in the works of the pre-Socratic Greeks: enantiodromia (enantios – opposite and dromos – running course) (Jung 1968). Put simply, this means when something is pushed to the extreme, it tends to turn into its opposite.

Q: Are there particular features to the Corona pandemic that makes it more attractive to conspiracy theories or conspiracy theorists? Or are we just much more aware of these theories because everyone is living through this at the moment? Mike S. Schäfer MS: In general, conspiracy theories are not a new phenomenon.

Communicating Science in Covid Times During the Corona crisis, the value of science and science communication has been clearly demonstrated.

The impact of bioenergy research Bioenergy production (liquid biofuels for long haul transportation, for instance) and use has come to be seen as an essential component of our energy matrix and it must be expanded if we are to avoid climate change [1]. It is the only available option for fossil fuels substitution for a large sector of our economies.

Over the past 10 years, my colleagues and I have been doing research on research, on how academic knowledge is created (i.e. scholarly communication) and disseminated (i.e. research communication). We have been looking at how researchers collaborate and share data (here, here and here), how they perform quality checks (here), where they publish and how they engage with the public (here and here). Perhaps the most important insight I have gained

This interview is done in personal capacity and based on insights such as recently published in the “International Handbook on Responsible Innovation: A Global Resource”. In 2013, you introduced a vision for Responsible Research and Innovation.

What is the value of social science today? Arthur Lupia, University of Michigan, Photo: Svetluša Surova For me, the value of social science is ultimately about the quality of life. What social science does is that it helps us to take observations of the world and put them into a form where we can understand more about how the world works. We can then use social science to anticipate likely consequences of our actions.

‘Altmetrics,’ and more specifically, ‘social media metrics’ are increasingly deemed valuable indicators to gauge the dissemination and reception of research outputs beyond academic circles, but their potential could be much greater.

In the last 10 years, we have spent a lot of time thinking about the impact of research, both from a research and science management perspective. A few years ago, we also started giving trainings for other researchers on how to approach the blackbox “societal impact”. Our experience is that few researchers really know whether and how their research can have a societal impact.