Japan SciCom Forum 2021

In this half-hour session, we will come together after almost two years of COVID, reset our focus and intentions, get to know a few new friends, and plan for a great Forum together. You will meet Heather Young, the new Vice President of Communications and Public Relations at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), who took on a new job in a new country in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. She will talk about her decision, her adventure, and what she’s learned so far. Plus, Heather will facilitate an interactive and facilitated ice breaker activity (don’t worry, it will be painless). Join us to launch the Forum and make new friends!

Kenneth studies primates – from feces to diseases – and wants as many people as possible to learn about his ‘neat’ topic. While he could not get his hands dirty during the pandemic, the HIRAKU 3MT competition was a great scicomm adventure. How did Kenneth manage to explain an entire PhD in three minutes?

Naoki has been a science communicator since 2002, and has worked with a medical publisher and a research institution before joining Hokkaido University where he now leads the international public relations team. His primary interest is content creation.

Tomomi is an Experience Design Director and Design Researcher with an MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art. She is a specialist in experience design, workshop facilitation, design realisation and community engagement. At DLX Design Lab, Tomomi currently leads design research and citizen science projects such as OMNI, an ocean monitoring network with local participation.

Tomoki originally studied Oriental History. He worked as a science communicator at Kyoto University Global Communications Office for three years and moved to WPI-ASHBi (Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Biology) Research Acceleration Unit in 2021.

Oana has 11 years of experience working for various astronomy and space organizations in science and technology communication and outreach. She is currently the Communication Strategy Officer at the European Southern Observatory and President of IAU Commission C2.

Ramasamy is the operations manager at the Office of Astronomy for Development of the International Astronomical Union, whose mission is 'astronomy for a better world'. He is passionate about applying science, especially astronomy and space, to create a better society.

Have you ever seen a sketchnote? It’s when a person sketches and takes notes, often live, to bring research, public service announcements and TED talks to life. It is a powerful visual tool that engages audiences and makes the content of the lecture more accessible and easy to understand. You can use this powerful tool in your own work. This workshop will show you how.

The Hisaki Mission, takotsubo cardiomyopathy, the Tomo-e Gozen Project, and the Fugaku Supercomputer. These are all significant scientific contributions from Japan, but how can we quickly and accurately convey the cultural references in these names and concepts to global audiences? In this workshop, participants will explore ways of incorporating Japanese cultural references into scientific communications to add color and interest to their stories. The techniques and topics covered in this workshop will be accessible and useful for science communicators who are native speakers of either Japanese or English.

The workshop will begin with a 15-minute presentation of helpful strategies for explaining Japanese cultural references in science communications. This will be followed by a 45-minute interactive session in which participants share their ideas on the homework topics (see Google Doc link below) and tackle other topics raised by the facilitator. Zoom’s Chat and Whiteboard functions will be used throughout the workshop.

Key takeaway: After completing this workshop, participants will be able to use a range of strategies to explain Japanese cultural references in science communications.

In this 60-minute mini-workshop, hosted by staff from the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE), we’ll explore how to design and facilitate engaging and productive virtual meetings. We’ll discuss the opportunities and challenges of working together online and outline the “Making a PACT” framework for effective meeting design. In addition to examples of the framework in action, there’ll be an opportunity to apply it directly to some example scenarios so that you leave feeling empowered to use the framework in your own work.

Note: attendance will be limited, first-come first-served.

This session builds on materials introduced in CSCCE’s free-to-download guidebook.

Today, virtually every online publication is assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), and many publishers require authors to authenticate via ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID). These permanent identification numbers help you find papers, even if the journal link you saved stops working, the author’s email changes or the Dropbox folder with raw data is deleted. And it is important for science communicators, not just researchers, to understand how these Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) work and are useful.

When and how can you get DOIs for your work? How is ORCID different from a Google Scholar profile? And who is enabling and providing PID services for what purposes? This workshop offers a quick overview of PIDs and how they are assigned to research outputs, researchers, organizations, and more. We then discuss how PIDs are embedded in the platforms and tools we use in scholarly communications, especially in tracking your research outputs and their impact and reach. We will demo Altmetric Explorer, a tool to discover how your research is mentioned in a variety of sources: social media, blogs, news sites, Wikipedia, policy documents, etc.

This session is designed for those engaged in science communication, research support, or public relations for research groups and institutions.

Journalists and public relations officers often want the same thing: to find interesting stories and tell them to a wide audience. But the way that journalists and PR officers approach the challenge of finding a good story is very different. In this session, we speak to a mass-media science journalist, a niche science journalist, and an ex-journalist turned public information officer to discover how they go about finding the right story for their audience.

This session will introduce the new media platform esse-sense.com which features scientists who transcend the boundaries of different scientific fields. It allows users to collect articles and passages that "open up your future" where you can discover fresh perspectives.

Toss Gascoigne, Australian National University: Communicating Science. A Global Perspective (ANU Press, 2020) describes science communication in 39 countries. Now the first analysis has been completed and will be published in a new book (Science Cultures in a Diverse World, Springer, Sept 2021). The 107 authors of chapters in Communicating Science used many different terms for 'science communication'. What terms were most popular, and in which countries were they used? Do they all mean the same thing? This session will present the 16 different terms, and host a conversation about this analysis.

Established in 1996, EurekAlert! is a non-profit news-release distribution platform operated by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) as a resource for journalists, public information officers and the public. This self-guided session will provide information on EurekAlert!’s features and services, with an opportunity to submit questions or follow-ups.

Occasionally we receive requests to publicize papers appearing in 'unsavory' journals. What can be done about it? What strategies can be employed? This session will discuss the grey-zone of academic publishing and what PIOs can do to cope (aside from hitting the bottle).

Scientific illustration is a way to communicate ideas: complex concepts, details, and subjects in an engaging and understandable way. Design conceptualization helps to make scientific topics accessible for many different audiences. This session will feature two experts who will showcase scientific graphical illustration works at each WPI research institute and open to the floor for Q&A and discussion.