A 2013 special issue of Science on “Communication in Science: Pressures and Predators ” focused on the integrity of submissions and peer reviewers, as well as the credibility of scientific literature, especially due to the proliferation of open access journals in that profit is linked to volume, rather than the quality of published scientific publications.

While the above issue put the focus on publishers and the rise of open access while maintaining quality standards, a recent PLOS collection targeted authors, scientists, in their quest to better communicate scientific content to society. Regardless of the facets and angles taken, scientific communication is very important in modern science and research, as proven by the interest of high-profile journals.

The PLOS ONE’s Science of Stories Collection  includes 15 submissions that propose solutions to real world, data-rich problems that use different empirical methods. Opposed to the approach of the Science’s issue in communication of science, the key here is in the term “Stories”. The guest editorial team wrote in the introductory editorial that “stories have the power to shape our identities and worldviews. They can be factual or fictional, text-based or visual and can take many forms—from novels and non-fiction to conspiracy theories, rumors and disinformation. We can characterize stories by their plot, their characters, their audience, their style, their themes or their purpose. Given the massive power of stories to alter the course of society, innovative methods to understand them empirically and quantitatively are necessary.”

GEOTEC has contributed to the Science of Stories Collection with one paper.  The paper title is “Interactive guidelines: Public communication of data-based research in cities” and is the result of the GEO-C project driven by the postdocs at the three different sites: UJI (Castellón), UNL (Lisbon), WWU (Muenster).

The abstract is:

Scientific research results are traditionally published as articles in peer-reviewed conference proceedings or journals. These articles often use technical jargon, which precludes the general public from consuming the results achieved. New ways to communicate scientific results are thus necessary to transfer scientific insights to non-experts, and this work proposes the concept of interactive guidelines to fill this gap. A web tool, called Interactive Guidelines Tool, was developed as a proof-of-concept for the idea. It was used in the context of the GEO-C project to communicate research outputs in smart cities scenarios to the public. A comparative analysis between the Interactive Guidelines Tool and related tools helps to highlight the progress it enables beyond the current state of the art. Interactive Guidelines Tool is available as an open-source tool and can be customised/extended by any interested researcher, in the process of making scientific knowledge and insights more accessible and understandable to a broader public.

Cite it as:

Trilles S, Granell C, Degbelo A, Bhattacharya D (2020) Interactive guidelines: Public communication of data-based research in cities. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0228008. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228008