4.2. Opening the windows of the ivory tower
Scientific outreach is an essential part of our work as emerging scientists, and engaging with society improves the quality of both our training and research. Engagement activities can include sharing science on social media, writing policy briefings, working with not-for-profit science education programs or developing relationships with local stakeholders. Investing time into outreach activities can be beneficial to ECR career development because it provides an opportunity to begin developing working relationships with stakeholders as early as possible. Building long-lasting involvement can help to address the lack of continuity and disconnect between local communities, stakeholders and scientists. Communicating scientific progress through media outreach can also lead to recognition amongst peers, developing non-academic networks, promoting scientific findings, and impacting policy making (Lutz et al., 2018).
To achieve stronger communication and outreach strategies, ECRs should leverage communication specialists at their institutions. Communication training empowers researchers to build their communication skills, and more effectively communicate the importance of their findings in a meaningful and relatable way. Working with academia-partnered media outlets such as The Conversation can also help scientists shape how their results are communicated. Additionally, collaboration between scientists, communication specialists, artists, and journalists should be encouraged to create compelling scientific stories.
Communication, education, and outreach initiatives are becoming more rewarded and formally recognized in the traditional academic framework following the development of peer-reviewed science communication journals such as Geoscience Communication (Illingworth et al., 2018). To ensure that future hydrological research projects will be clearly communicated and will address a societal need, the work of ECRs needs to be evaluated beyond their number of publications. Non-traditional metrics, such as altmetric (Priem et al., 2010), can be used to quantify online interactions. Further development of metrics that include impact and usefulness of research should be developed (Lebel and Mclean, 2018).