 Just to recap briefly to put today's agenda into the context of the workshop as a whole, we started off yesterday with a very high level overview of a survey conducted by echelon insights on behalf of the national academies on public perceptions of scientific research that involves animals. The results of this survey, which were consistent with numerous other surveys that have been conducted over the years, but provided more detail and raised many more questions to dig into prompted the roundtable of the board on animal health sciences conservation and research to sponsor this workshop. Then we had three sessions to explore the perspectives of some of the stakeholder groups with whom scientists want to communicate effectively. As a reminder, for the purposes of this workshop, we're using the term scientists as shorthand to refer to the subset of all scientists who are involved in scientific research that requires the care and use of animals and want to communicate effectively about it. And that includes all of those who prefer provide support to that research, taking care of the animals overseeing the research and so on. So we first considered advice from Paul McKellips and Matthew Russet for scientists speaking with the media. We learned from Jessica Kwan and Katie Serafin about the perspectives of non scientists trying to understand how scientists and lab animal veterinarians think about research with animals. And similar page and Marie break shared with us some insights into what journalists are concerned about in their work. We also learned from Allison Bennett about topics that she finds to be inadequately communicated by scientists. And Lisa here 11 discussed with us the issues about research that does not involve work with living animals, which are worthwhile for scientists to know about when trying to communicate effectively with the general public. Today, we will gain insights into the perspectives of another stakeholder group that have institutional leadership, which necessarily cannot focus exclusively on research with animals, but must manage much broader considerations. And we'll dig into other topics related to the spectrum of openness as it relates to effective communication about research with animals. Communicating about the ethics related to research with animals and communicating on social media about research with animals. As Margaret noted yesterday, the order presentation of the topics does not reflect anything about their perceived importance. The planning committee considers each of the topics to be an essential element of the workshop, and the order was mostly dictated by logistical considerations. We will conclude with a Q&A session with a panel of the workshop presenters. We encourage you to send your questions as they occur to you by entering them via the Q&A function in Zoom. We will try to address as many of the questions related to the focus of the workshop as possible, giving priority to the ones that are brought up by the most people. The planning committee members and presenters are also encouraged to engage in dialogue with the presenters in each session. For the attendees, we would love your feedback on this workshop and we'll be sending out a brief survey afterward to all those who registered to keep an eye out for that. Now we'll get started with today's workshop with a presentation about USRO, and I will turn this over to Crystal Johnson to introduce our presenter. Crystal. Good morning. Our next presenter will be Nicole Navateel from Sterling Biomedical Resources. And the session objective for session number seven is to provide information about an initiative to encourage openness in the US about science research involving animals. Nicole is the president and founder of Sterling Biomedical Resources, LLC, which provides a wide range of business services including communication, change management, and strategy development. Their mission is to support small businesses in the biomedical industry, offering new and innovative technologies and new models that will improve animal welfare and improve translational data derived from animal studies. Today, Nicole is coming to us to speak more about the USRO Initiative, where she has served as the member of the USRO Initiative Sterling Committee since its exception, and she is the chair of the survey committee. Nicole has published several papers and resources on the care use of large animal models. More about her research can be seen and her bio can be seen on the program. Nicole. Thank you so much, Crystal, and thank you so much to Alice and the committee for the privilege of being able to be here today, and to Nia and Mariah for all the support and help getting me here. So I'm just really excited to be here to talk to you about the US Animal Research Open Initiative, which is something that's very important to me. So I'm going to go through kind of who we are for those of you who aren't familiar with it, what our goals are, what our work has been so far. And then I'm going to kind of take the opportunity to also interject some of my own experience as someone who's gone through the journey of coming from someone who's gone through the journey of actually writing a paper against animal research when I was in high school to being a scientist working with animals and research to being a communicator to both other scientists and the public about animal research and how, and some of the tips and tricks that I've learned through that journey. So I'm going to try to include all of that in this presentation. So where is the, I didn't prepare and get my clicker. So the USA arrow initiative was really born out of the fact that several countries, I want to say, I think there's 10 now have formal research agreements amongst research institution in those countries. And so several years ago there was a dialogue around, should the US be doing this could the US be doing this with our landscape. And so a group of a lot of representation from academia, pharma companies, really, really a lot of key stakeholders and industry met to discuss this topic and what we came to the conclusion of is that we should move forward with an initiative and that would make it easier to have the dialogue with institutional leadership. It's easier to talk about an initiative to be more open than to to try to ask them to agree to be more open. And it also allows us the option to allow individuals to be part of our community and be able to participate in this regardless of the position that their institution is at this time, especially people who really want to help their institution be more open to the idea of openness. So our mission is really to our goal is really to increase the number of institutions in the United States that are willing to have conversations about animal research and be able to put that into context. Next slide please. Oh, did I figure it out. So our mission is to empower individuals and institutions and our audience is you so we're not actually the ones doing the public advocacy we might be on behalf of our institutions but together as a as a community. We're here to provide support to all of you to be able to then have those conversations with the public or be able to work with your institution to be able to develop a plan of openness to be able to have these dialogues with various stakeholders within the public and within your institutions, because we do find that even I like the word that's been used in reach we do find that you know even having these dialogues within your institutions is really important because not everyone understands or appreciates why this has happened or even knows in some larger institutions that this that there's animal research happening. So our mission is to empower individuals and institutions based on the principles of openness and this includes building trust supporting science and countering misinformation and disinformation. And I think we all embraces vision this is the same vision of this workshop today and that's a future where the public understands and supports and endorses even our work with and the work our work with and the important contributions that animals make to it and understands that that we depend on animal studies only when there's no alternative and I want to stress that point. It's a wonderful, wonderful group of volunteers who are doing all of the work. We have over 125 now volunteers from industry academia government and breeders. And they they comprise our steering group and then seven committees that are doing all of our work, working on our strategic plan and our mission and making sure we stay on track. Helping us find those institutions that really exemplify the idea of openness and are doing and are really taking the lead on this and being able to provide platforms. For these organizations to be able to talk about what they're doing share their experiences and network with with people who want to become more involved or want to to mirror after them. We have several groups working on how we communicate our mission through one pagers our website, our ambassadors who are out spreading our message. Our openness survey which is designed to help us track, get to get the landscape of openness now and be able to track progress of openness as we continue our mission. And then communications and our most recently added committee is our impacts and outcomes to be able to really put some metrics around what we're doing and making sure that we're having our intended impact. And this is meant to both. We want to track both the impact of organizational openness and how organization the methods that organizations are taking to be more open, but also our individual efforts and our ability to talk on our own. And as I mentioned, this is an initiative. We want to be very, very inclusive. We want everyone to feel comfortable at whatever level they or the organization is that. And so we do have a statement of intent. And by signing this you're really the your organization is really just committing to our mission, and that you want to be part of the dialogue you want to be part of the community. And we want to be part of discussing if we were to reach an agreement what that would look like and if that's achievable. So there we don't want to have a very prescriptive agreement at this point but we really want to have the opportunity for anyone who wants to be part of our community to be able to join. And so you can look look up more on our website about our statement and intent and have your organization join. So we did our initial openness survey this year, and we presented some preliminary results at the National ALAS meeting and will be presenting a more comprehensive results sometime early next year in the next couple months that should be available. So I'm not going to go into the details here, but I am going to give you some examples of the various types of openness that we found in the survey. One of the facilities and the number one type of example of openness that we found in the in the surveys was facility tours, especially for affiliated members of the of the organization so non animal staff, students or family and friends of people affiliated with the organization later. And then some additional facilities some facilities were also adding additional people such as the media and various members of the community presentation and educational events, public talks were another popular way, especially internally and for students to understand what's what their organization is doing and why it's important and the work that's being done with animals. Special events, Brad events, presence at community events, some organizations to do like a booth or something at a, at a, at an institutional event to be able to talk about what they're doing. Press releases and articles and then sharing inspection reports and records and making that available. Wrong way. So, why is openness so important and I think we all know why it's important. And this is where I might pivot and just talk a little bit about some of my experience and some of the things that I've learned that have helped shaped my experience and my perspective on how we can be open and lack of transparency equals lack of trust and this is for all of society now, our generations of the millennials and Gen Z and those younger, they really expect more transparency there is a plethora of information at our fingertips, and gone through the days of, you know, the secret recipe or the secret sauce or, or proprietary methods, you know, several companies are now even using transparency as a competitive advantage, and sharing everything from their resource planning and sustainable supply to their service, they're paying their executives and that that they're, they're using that to promote themselves and many people expect now many employees expect transparency from their employers and many consumers expect transparency from the companies they're buying from. They don't want the sauce to be a secret they want to know what's in it they want to make sure it complies with their values they want to make sure it's healthy. So, we don't really have a choice, we have to really start talking about what we're doing and and giving the public that level of trust that they expect to have from the institutions and the organizations that are part of society. One of the things that I think is really important is control of the narrative, and we have been allowing someone else to control how the public feels about what we do. We have not been the ones communicating our stories and I'm going to tell you a little personal story. I told you before that I wrote a paper about against animal research when I was in high school so I became interested in science as a kid when my brother was diagnosed with diabetes I was only eight years old. And fortunately it was 1991 so insulin had been around, you know, he had therapies and my family got really involved with the juvenile diabetes research foundation so we were privy to all the ongoing, the pumps that were being developed that he now uses and a lot of the new technology that was coming through and I found it really fascinating and really important because it impacted my brother's life and our life so much and I always really had a passion for biology. And so that was I studied biology all through high school, and I had a, I had no idea that animals were involved in that the whole time that I was involved in, and learning about this stuff. And when I got to high school, I loved animals I loved biology, and I was to write a paper on a controversial topic and I wrote it on animal testing and I had a very influential teacher who was very opposed to animal research and helped me with this paper helped direct me towards resources that I could use and I was sold I believed that, you know, with computer models and with tissue testing and cell testing that we didn't need animals anymore and that that it was highly unethical and I very passionately presented this to my, to my classmates in high school and I passionately believe this author or undergraduate studying biology and studying zoology and anthropology and biological anthropology I was against animal testing and I got to graduate school. And I started studying with some researchers who are working on some very, very severe diseases deadly diseases impactful diseases, and most of the research it was and it was a biological anthropology program so most of the work that was being done was in humans, but there was a small subset that had to be done in animals and I started to realize that everything that I thought I knew about animal research was completely wrong. I think that, you know, going back to the survey, and thinking about the difference with the level of education, it took me till graduate school to really get the truth about what's and it took me seeing it firsthand and fortunately my lab I worked on human tissues and human blood samples, but I was right across the hall from me attending that, and I got to know her really well and really started to understand the truth. And so, lo and behold, I finished graduate school and I ended up at Marshall by resources one of the largest providers of non animal, or I'm a non rodent animal models for research and I started being able to go out and see research institutions from government to academia to pharma and CROs and realized how much the people working with these animals truly love them and how important this work is and it was really eye opening and I'm really happy with the story because it shouldn't have taken me that long, I should have been able to during my now granted, you know, it's been a while, not to date myself, but it's been a couple decades at high school but still, you know, there was someone else creating that narrative for me. And so I really think that we have to pay attention to how we're viewed and we have to stop letting somebody else tell that story for us. So where can we improve these are some things that I've learned. So, I started as a scientist, then I got to Marshall and then I started working with scientists to help explore how some of the animal models pig models ferret models non traditional models might fill some of the gaps. And so I went in there, you know, super excited, like, look at these models, they're great, let me give you all the facts and I was surprised that how it wasn't working people were just like, Hey, that sounds great. Give me that fact sheet and we'll, and we'll adopt that right away and so I had to really kind of take a look at how I was communicating even with scientists and understanding how to change minds how to approach new ideas to get that dialogue going. And so I think somehow it like disconnects. The biggest thing I learned is facts don't change hearts and minds and I think we know that we all talked about that yesterday, we cannot erase emotion from the dialogue. People form their opinions and beliefs based on emotions not facts we are feeling beings before we are thinking beings all of us everyone in this room everyone online, no matter how scientific and rational you want to think you are we are all feeling beings. And a change to one's worldview can feel like an attack their identity and cause them to feel threatened and to double down on their position. So anytime we're defensive, we actually might be pushing people away from us. And people choose to interact with people and media and stories that come that confirm their beliefs that not those that challenge them. That's called confirmation bias. That's a real thing. There's a Netflix special about it. We have unfortunately we have algorithms that push social media towards us that confirm what we like that's why we're getting so much information from social media even though it's not a trusted source because it's confirming and validating our beliefs every time we log in because algorithms have already learned who we are. So we need to remember this that when we're going into dialogues when we're presenting information that we can't go at it full strength charge ahead. We have to understand that we will push people away if we challenge what people's feelings and their beliefs are. So one of the ways that I've been able to really understand how to connect with people is through vulnerability, empathy and compassion and we talked a lot about empathy. Yesterday and having empathy for the person we're speaking with or the audience that we're speaking with. We also need to be able to create a space where they can have empathy for us. And the way that we can do that is through vulnerability and vulnerability is exactly that we're opening ourselves up and being vulnerable to a potential attack. That's what we do to somebody potentially really not liking what we do, but that's the only way for them to really start to believe us and understand us and have empathy for us and eventually have compassion and that's what we want. We want people to have compassion for what we're doing and compassion for the work that we're doing and believe in it and be able to support it when we need it. So one of the ways that I've had a lot of success in doing this is through circles, through team building circles. And it's exactly what you think we sit in a circle we have a talking piece. We go around everyone gets a chance to speak if they'd like. We ask very pointed questions. I've done this with several different types of organizations and several different groups within organizations and it's a really great way when you're working with internal groups that animal care technicians or veterinarians different people that have various perspectives to be able to allow them to have a chance to speak with senior leadership we've had CEOs join with animal care technicians or directors join. And the two questions that always always are successful so I'll ask around of, of kind of get to know you questions and humanize each other but then the two questions that always seem to have an impact is, what do you like best about your role within your institution or your affiliation with this institution. And then everyone can talk about what they really like best and then what's one thing you would change if you could, to make things better easier within this institution and it's really a great way to help people are surprised at what the CEO often says because usually it's something like I wish we had greater communication with the team or wish we could do more and, and the technicians that you know it's also surprising because a lot of times it's I wish we could do more for the animals, I wish we could do this I wish we could do that. And it's a really a great way to help both to help whoever, whoever means to see the other side perspective, it's a great way to do that in a safe way where everyone gets a voice and it's not and it's not a head on let's let's have an argument and so I'd love to do more of this if people are interested because I think that there's some value here and I've had a lot of success and in very different contexts with using with using circles it's just an easy safe way to start these dialogues. So the next slide is I love this metaphor so I'm going to, I'm probably going to butcher it there's some resources here if you want to really look at it but I think this is a great metaphor for understanding how we process information and change and it's from Jonathan Hyde he's a social psychologist at NYU, and it's elephant in the rider and we've talked about how we have an emotional brain and a logical brain. And we have to deal with both and in this metaphor, the rider is the logical brain the rational brain, it's got a direct word where where they're going. The elephant is the emotional brain. The elephant is bigger. It's unpredictable. It has its own agenda. It might not agree with the rider. It might resist the rider how many times have we believed in something but emotions contradicted it especially when going through change. So the idea is that we have to try to, when we're trying to implement change, we have to recognize that while we might get somebody to agree with us logically. Emotionally they might still be resistant and how can we get that emotional, how can we know as Dr Bennett talked about yesterday how can we connect those dots. And I have found and the research has backed me up that there is one way a stick or what elephants eat a branch with leaves that we can use to motivate the elephant and that is validation. Everybody wants to feel validated. And I'm going to give you just a really quick example of validation in the context of research and that could be if I'm talking to a stranger who doesn't know me. What do you do? Well, I work with diabetic pigs to study diabetes. They said, Oh, that's, that's really sad. That makes me sad. Oh, I'm, oh, what? Oh, no, I didn't mean to make you sad. Like, I'm sorry that makes you sad. Can you tell me more about why that makes you sad? Well, just the idea of animals being sick and suffering, that's just, I can't, that makes me really sad. Oh, no, I can totally understand that would make someone sad like that. That definitely that's, that's terrible. So can I talk to you a little bit about how we make sure that the animals stay healthy, and that they're not suffering with our work. So now I haven't pushed against them, they're allowed to feel sad that's their feelings they their feelings need to be validated. I'm inviting them to come in on this journey with me instead of trying to push against them. And it is a dialogue, you know, I think we, we sometimes feel like we're in an imposition and I just have to keep answering and keep answering and keep answering but you can pause and stop and ask, can you tell me more about why you feel that way. Can you, can you help me understand, you know what it is you think that's happening so that I can share with you my experiences. That's a great way to not be oppositional and a great way to really kind of empathize that they have people who don't know or have missing who have misinformation have really valid feelings, and they need to be validated in order to feel heard and in order to then want to hear you. So I'm trying to wrap this up because I know I'm running out of time. Are we sharing the right stories with the right audiences. And I like this little chart because it really talks about how we need to have the right combination of information and emotions. We need to tap into the emotional side of people we need to create that empathy in order for them to really be compelled by what we're doing. And I do want to make the point of whose job is this and we're scientists and we all think this is important but we're all scientists and, you know, we're all, you know, experts in neurobiology and endocrinology we're veterinarians they've gone to school for, you know, eight, 10 years and now we have to become experts in communication and storytelling to like this is a lot we're asking a lot and so I think we need to recognize that there is a lot of people that can help and that this is an organizational and an industry initiative this is not something that we can do on our own. And that we need to help engage with the right stakeholders we need to have conversations about who else needs to be in the room. And that's because I applaud everyone here and everyone online who is learning about this and he was stepping up to talk about it because you're already an expert and now you're trying to be a secondary expert and that's amazing and that means you really believe in what you're doing. And there's others that need to be supporting us as well. So, in summary, this is a shared responsibility, organizationally and in an industry wide. We need to remember that we're all emotional beings and we need to be including that emotion, and not just facts. We need to take control of our narrative it's our narrative we need to be in control of it we need to be telling our stories. We need to do that with transparency and we need to build trust. And we're not alone. The US hero initiative is here. We're not having to reinvent the wheel every single one of us we can do this together as an industry and share with each other and learn from each other and be able to tell our stories together. That is the end. Thank you so much, Nicole. Would you would you mind elaborating a little bit regarding the US animal research openness initiative. We heard yesterday from Dr Allison Bennett that we could we could argue that the United States is very very transparent, probably a leader in that area. And in fact, the way are the animal research here in the United States is governed. The public can get a lot of information about that work that happens. And so can can you talk about how how the initiative you sorrow initiative, sort of, you know, compliments that or you know what is it that that initiative would help the public be able to understand or get. It's not already available through public request systems. That's a great question. So, that's very true. We, as Dr Bennett said, we're one of the most open countries in the world in terms of what's available, especially for our public institutions. One of the issues is that it's it's only available if you're looking for it. So one of the things that the USA arrow can do now is open as we want to be we can put the information on our websites we can put it on our social media. We can get that information out there but if it's not in front of the audiences that need to hear it it's only going to go to those who are looking for it. And so we need to inspire the right audiences to either come to us looking for it, or be able to get it to them so that they can find it so that's one of the challenges is that pretty much anyone can find anything they want, even with public institutions I mean, even even or I'm sorry even with private institutions that are regulated by the USDA there's a lot of information you can find about a private institution as well. But unless you know where to look, unless you're going to look for it. It's hard to find it or it's not in the forefront of your mind and you're not thinking about it until until something comes up that makes you question what's going on. And so one of the goals of this initiative is to really help us find ways to get the right platforms to reach the right audiences to interact more with media more with our communities and being able to do outreach. So that it's it's front and center. So hopefully that answers the question. Thank you so much. Yeah, so it sounds like one of the one of the benefits is really being able to put context to what's already out there. I mean, when somebody, you know, an institution or even an individual learn more about, you know, openness efforts that are already happening, you know, so one of the wonderful things that we see in the United States is there are a lot of institutions that are doing great things in openness. So, is there a way that someone might be able to learn more about what others might be doing. Yes, absolutely. That's a great question. If you would like to learn more about what our exemplars are doing, you can go to us arrow.org, and we have a whole page dedicated to exemplars. We are also working very hard to provide opportunities at National ALAS and other meetings where exemplar giving exemplars to speak doing webinars. So I highly encourage if you're interested in learning more about the exemplars and the work that the US hero is doing, please visit the website sign up to be involved and check out the exemplars page and what they're doing and reach out to those organizations because they've agreed they want to talk about what they're doing they want to share their stories. So reach out to those organizations that are there and start asking your questions and seeing if you can learn from what they're doing. Awesome. So we have a question that came in and we are ahead of schedule so which is a good thing. So the question is, can you reshare the quad chart about the info and information for sharing the right stories with the right audience. You didn't spend a lot of time on that slide. Can we go back to that slide and share that and then if there's if there's a few more words you wanted to say about that that would be great. Absolutely. Could we get the presentation back up. So this is really just, I mean this is very simplified, but this really breaks down so how when you're telling a story. This is for any story, whether you're talking about work with animals or whether you're talking about a story, creative writing that the balance between information and emotion so obviously if there's no information and there's no emotion it's an incredibly boring story and you're probably not going to get anybody interested in that. If there's a lot of information but not a lot of emotion it's a fact based story and we as scientists we like facts based stories we read research articles all the time. We like when there's a not a lot of bias interjected so that's actually one of our challenges because we're all taught to write academically I mean I say so use a PA when I'm writing like a story, because that's how I learned how to how to write so. So, you know we're familiar with fact based stories we resonate with it because we're scientists and we like to use information our emotions are informed by facts and we're still emotional but that that that we use those facts. That's part of our personalities, but that's not everyone. A lot of people I had a I had the opportunity to have a great mentor who was not in the industry at all and he had a background in creative writing and he was very very candid with me and I would write things and he would be like you know, nobody cares about this he's like get it down 10 words you have 10 words get it down to 10 words. And, and you know how I don't feel anything from this is tells me nothing. Great, you guys did this what what does that mean for me as the reader, and I had to do a lot of how to how to really engage somebody who isn't as excited about the research as I am and who isn't isn't directly involved and so that's where you get into the emotions and playing into these your own vulnerabilities being vulnerable you know talking about your own feelings about it. Really, you'd think it's counter intuitive but it's not I mean people appreciate that people appreciate that you have feelings about what you're doing. And even if it's like I might say you know like, well do the animals, you know, even if they say do the animals have to be killed I might say they do. And that can be tough if you have a bond with them but also I'm okay with it because, you know the animals don't feel any pain it's exactly the same as, as when you take your animal to the vet and the data we get out of it is so important towards what we're doing and these animals have a great life up until so Honestly, I'm okay with that and it doesn't you know it's more important to me that I spend my time making sure that the animals have this amazing life, and that their time here and the sacrifice they're making is, you know, they feel like they had a great life and they were And so if they have to end in euthanasia that that's something I'm okay with, they even that's being vulnerable, because people might not agree with me and that's okay they're allowed to, but that at least allows us to have a dialogue so you know opening up and sharing your own feelings about where you maybe are uncomfortable or where you're not uncomfortable or where you're maybe uncomfortable with not being uncomfortable. At least that that starts to bring more a more compelling story a more human story to what you're telling, you know, and a story that's full of all emotions is very entertaining and that's a great way to that's propaganda. Honestly, so if you can, you know, mix emotions with proper accurate information you can really provide a compelling story and so that's really what this this picture is trying to say is that, you know, you have to have the right balance in order to really provide a compelling story that's going to reach people and resonate with them. Thank you we heard yesterday the importance of developing our own elevator pitch or own story so those are great tips and and one more question. With regard to transparency, we find that some opponents to animal research use this shared information out of context to shift the narrative. So what are some suggestions to promote transparency while preventing this issue. So that's a really, really, really great question and that's a really important problem is using the information out of context and I think I don't have an easy answer for this because I think there was an easy answer we would have done it a long time ago. I think the best that we can do is to continue to provide the full story and make sure that that that information is available. Making sure that we have the context readily available so you know put a posting your usda inspection reports on your website is great and I fully encourage it. They can find it anybody who wants to can find it to make it easy for somebody to find it, but the great thing is you then are able to put the additional context around it be able to explain why something happened if there is a finding in there and be able to talk about what you did and I think also the other piece of it is getting ahead of things. So being really sharing the story before somebody else gets to it so if you did have something happen, if you can talk about it first, be able to say this happened. And either we were we were surprised we or this happened this is why we were working on it we hadn't quite solved the solution here's where we're at now. We're going to keep you updated or this is completely solved being able to put that out there first and being able to say this is what happened this is what we did it's out there. Now there isn't really a leg to stand on and they can't say look, they're doing these horrible things look it's on their usda report. Yeah, but if I go to their website it explains exactly what happened and exactly who is involved and what they did about it that the, you know that the attending veterinarian was involved and, and that they they address this issue and it actually makes sense why it happened and it's a normal occurrence and, and you know sometimes the animals might, you know, get into a fight their animals sometimes they get annoyed with their roommate just like we do. So, you know, sometimes things happen and they're normal and they're natural and it's, and it's, and it's, we if we can tell that story first it'll help because then it's not a gotcha moment then it's a look they have this problem yeah and look they told us why. So that that would be my one recommendation is that, you know, putting that context out there first, then it makes it harder to take it out of context because you are. It's obvious you're fabricating a story if the context is was already available. Thank you so much. And here's just asking for some advice a lot of times when we're talking about the animals that are involved in research. We often say that their purpose spread for research. And somebody is asking is there a better way to sort of say that this this request or saying, you know, some will equate that to just like food. Animals are raised for food. So I don't know is there a certain way that you address purpose spread animals for research, or where the animals come from for for research. Yeah, that's a fantastic question because within the research industry that means a lot because you know, I think, because everyone's using class A breeders and and and animals that were bred for research but there was a time when this was really important. So purpose spread is really industry jargon. So it's one of those things where when you're talking to the public. I don't mean anything. So yes, I think one of the ways you know I would say that these animals were bred and raised and reared for life in a laboratory and working with dogs that's a big deal. So I would explain when I would be talking about the dogs, you know that these dogs are purposely raised in an environment where they're used to being handled. They're used to being in kennels, they're used to being exposed to different procedures different people being around them, so that when they're in a laboratory they're perfectly content and happy. And I can tell you from experience because I took one home that they are perfectly content happy and I almost regretted it at first I thought I made a terrible mistake because he was so overwhelmed with what do I do in a house I'm used to being in a kennel so they are happy they are adjusted to this environment so that's one of the ways is you know think of it like a working dog that these animals have been conditioned and reared to be happy and content and not stressed in this environment and stressing that the not stressed part is important we don't want to do research and stressed animals that have high cortisol levels. So I will emphasize that when I'm talking to people that it's really critical that the animals are calm and happy and relaxed because if they're aren't if they're stressed and anxious, that's going to really skew our data and we don't want that that's bad science. And that can help but I would say, you know, words like purpose bread that's industry jargon, even things like minimize pain and distress. That's industry jargon that I mean, I say, Oh, we do a lot to minimize pain and distress what do you do to minimize pain and distress. Are you minimizing how much pain and distress you're putting them in. Are you making sure they have minimal pain and distress like even these kinds of things we. There's a lot that we take for granted because we're just so used to it and we're so used to the jargon that are very questionable to people and that's another area where you can try to do dialogue and say things like, does that make sense, or do you understand what I mean by that and really help. You know, we talked about mirroring yesterday and really helping to like pause for a moment and say am I making sense is this is this something that makes sense to you because I might be taking that for granted. All right, thank you so much. We appreciate your advice and your presentation I think we're going to move on to the panel. All right, thank you everyone. The other was online already. The other presenters online we're ready to go. Perfect. All right, so we are ready to start our session number eight considerations along the spectrum of openness. Myself Crystal Johnson and Paula Clifford will be moderating this session and this session of just objective is to showcase the many considerations to keep in mind as an institution determines for itself. We have the appropriate level of openness about scientific research involving animals. We have several amazing panelists that will be participating. And I'll give a short bio for each one of them and then we'll begin with the panel discussion. So Kristen Layton is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Science, and she joined Louisiana State University faculty in 2018. Her research exam is hormones, the brain and behavior in wild sunburns in parts to better understand the impacts of stress on humans and wildlife. Dr. Lane's current work focuses on three areas, the neurobiology of neophobia, the effects of client climate change or sibling competition, and the interactions between the immune system and the stress response. Jim Newman serves as the director of strategic communications for Americans for medical progress, where he leads amp's media and communications program. He also assists with amp's extensive public education efforts. Prior to joining AMP as an employee, Jim served on the organization's board of directors for several years. And in the past, Jim was the director of external communications for the University of Texas, MD Anderson, and the director of media relations for organs health and science university at Oregon and Oregon's National Center. Wendy Jarrett has been chief executive of understanding animal research, the UK's animal research advocacy organization since 2012. She led the development of the Concordia and on openness on animal research in the UK and worked with colleagues across Europe to set up the European Animal Research Association in 2014. In 2022 and 2023 she worked with colleagues in Australia and New Zealand to create UAR Oceana. Wendy is the vice chair of the UK Home Office, Animals and Science Committee. And last but not least is Eva. She is the director of communications and media relations at the foundation for biomedical research. The FBR is a 501C3 nonprofit organization established in 81 to promote public understanding and support for responsible and necessary animal research. Eva has been FBR's director of communication and media relations since July of 2019. So let's welcome our panelists and we're ready to get started. Okay, I think I was going to go first. Is that right? Okay. And I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. I've got. Okay, it says it. It won't let me share my screen. Okay, there we go. Thank you. Okay, let's see. Alright, so thank you everyone for your attendance today and thank you for that introduction. As Crystal mentioned, I am an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at LSU. And my research is really focused on understanding how physiology, neurobiology and behavior help wild animals successfully cope with environmental challenges which can be anything from predators to disease. My own experience dealing with anti-animal research activism started back in 2017 when I was still a postdoc at Yale University. And basically in March of that year I was approached by a Yale undergrad, Mary Chukwu, you can see here in the author line. And she was a writer for a really wonderful student publication at Yale that's called the Yale Scientific Magazine. Mary wanted to interview me about some research that I was doing using computed tomography CT scans, which is the sort of biomedical imaging technique that's also used in people. And we were studying body composition and wild birds in response to captivity stress using CT scans. So we did the interview. And it appeared in the April edition of the magazine. So you can see her April 6, 2017. Well, just about a month later, there was a Yale sociology student who I never met and never interacted with whose name was Han Wen, and she graduated and went to go work for PETA. And that is when there was a harassment campaign against me that started. So you can see starting at about May, there were, you know, articles on PETA's website about me, there started to be some protests, email campaigns, things like that. As far as I can tell, Han probably saw this Yale Scientific Magazine article about me and brought it to PETA, or it's possible that PETA just, you know, knew that they had this Yale alumna who was working for them and they saw it as an opportunity to do more. Campaigns at Yale, and they found the article themselves, but regardless, it, you know, it's just one of these things, right, it was kind of wrong place at the wrong time. And that was, I think, how it all started. So when I first started getting, you know, these angry emails and social media posts against, you know, the research that I was doing. I was pretty surprised and upset, you know, I wanted to kind of speak out and defend myself and the work that we were doing. But I got advice that, you know, hey, this is, you know, kind of a crisis situation with crisis management, often the response is okay, just put your head down, wait for it to blow over. I had never dealt with anything like this before, and so that was what I did. And it didn't help, right, so the harassment continued. And actually, in fact, it may have even gotten a little bit worse in terms of just the volume of protests, emails, messages on social media and things like that. And because I'm a scientist, I was like, okay, well, the keep your head down and wait for it to blow over approach like that, that isn't working. Let's try something else. And so then, you know, I reached out to some really helpful scientists who dealt with harassment themselves. You know, also started talking to people from groups like speaking of research in the UK, and some of the folks from Americans for medical progress. And then with their encouragement, I started doing what I really wanted to do from the beginning, which was to speak out about, okay, here's what I'm actually doing. And so, you know, you can see here. Okay, I started talking to reporters, you know, on the left here, this is an article that appeared in Science, where I talked to David Grimm about about, you know, the whole campaign and about what my work is really about. You know, I started posting on Twitter, and you can see here, this is an article from IFL Science that I didn't actually talk to a journalist there, but they were sort of following my campaign. And you can sort of see like, I started saying like, okay, here's what I'm going to say about my research on Twitter. And you know, yeah, I have, you know, when people have asked me to appear on podcasts and talk about my work, and also about the harassment, I'm happy to do that. What, you know, I also, you know, one of the things I've also done is published my own pieces, right, so I've published, you know, there was something that I published at Yale about animal research myths and reality that appeared on their postdoctoral publication webpage. And then, you know, when I started here at LSU, I also published a letter to the editor, just sort of, you know, here's what I do, here's why it's important, right. And a huge effort that I made was to really kind of go through my professional webpage. And, you know, I'll be honest and say initially, my professional webpage had been full of scientific jargon and wasn't communicating I think very clearly about, you know, exactly how I was using animals and why I was using animals and the work that I was doing. So, I really rewrote a lot of my website. And, and I, you know, you can, if you want to see more details like here's the QR code and here's the URL and you can kind of check those out for yourselves. And really tried to use more accessible language, directly talking about, you know, the purpose and the benefits of our work, and, you know, exactly the types of things that we're doing with animals and why. And, you know, one of the things that I think I'm the most proud of and I think has really been the most effective is this FAQ page about animal research that we have. And you can see again a QR code here in the URL, and, you know, really try to address kind of point by point like here are some here are some questions that I've gotten from journalists as well as in emails and, you know, sort of talking points that I've seen about my work. And, you know, try to try to address these things. And I do know from looking at visitation data that this is actually one of the most visited parts of my website. So I know people are looking at this. And, you know, I will say, you know, the harassment campaigns have continued, but in terms of the volume of harassment and the tone of the messages that I've that I've gotten over time. They've really dramatically shifted so I do think that, you know, talking to journalists, being more open on my web page and kind of even specifically addressing these types of frequently asked questions. I think these things have been really helpful. So, yeah, and I really think that a big part of it is that, you know, when someone read something awful. That has been written about me or said in a podcast or whatever, they can Google me and they also now see what I have to say, and what journalists have to say and, you know, in some cases what my colleagues have said speaking out to support me. And they, they can see that there's two sides to this story right and they can sort of try to weigh those weigh those two sides for themselves. Yeah, so that's that's kind of my presentation I just wanted to do a really brief overview of my own story and I'm happy to take any questions about it. We're going to hold all questions to the end. Thank you Christine will have Jim up next. Okay, let me just load up my slides here and just let me know if you don't see anything here. Very brief intro I mean I already had one again communications director for Americans for medical progress with some a lot of past work in biomedical research specifically in academia. Most recent stop was MD Anderson Cancer Center but the majority of my comments today will be based on my experiences in Oregon and that's where I was the director of communications both for the university hospital and health system but also for the research venture, and that was the Oregon National Primary Research Center I actually served as the director of communications for that center as well for many years. I loved it was something that I literally spent part of my week out there every single week and it was one of the best parts of my job. So again, a lot of my comments today will be focused on those those years and those experiences. I wanted to share a little bit about how we sort of followed what what Christine just just went through is she talked about how her thinking had shifted based on the experiences she she underwent and that's exactly what happened at an institutional level level level at Oregon health and science university is, and that event occurred in August 2000. And I'm not going to say that we were never targeted by animal rights groups before that we actually were of course most institutions are before that. We had occasional protests and some disruption event disruptions, but there were no sustained campaigns it wasn't something we dealt with on a weekly basis or even a monthly basis it just happened once a while sort of standard for an research facility that studies both humans and animals. Things shifted pretty drastically in August 2000 and that's when we were we learned that we had been infiltrated by an animal rights group. And sort of follow the typical pattern is lots of allegations in this case that our infiltrator actually himself spoke out and talked about his work there. There was a lot of images and video and things like that. And as a result of that infiltration there was a tremendous amount of activity, significant increase in protests on site protest I think the first protest we witnessed right after the infiltration was announced was over 100 people that wasn't typical for us normally was five to 10 people that would protest outside our facilities. We had these long term sustained campaigns by by a variety of groups. You know and as for tactics and what we experienced out and I should mention, really important to note that there was a usd inspection of course and we were we applauded that and the usda ended up clearing the primary center, however it was about a three or four months period between when the allegations were first made and and you know during the investigation, etc. So there's that gap in time where the public sort of were was hearing all of these negative things about the primary center, and frankly hearing very little from us and that was a problem. So what did we experience as a result of that campaign well certainly countless protests it was sort of a, it was a weekly thing but felt like every single month or maybe a couple times a month we had a protest, either at our facility or sometimes outside of our hospital time I remember they protested outside of our emergency department which is you know not exactly the best place to protest when you have amulets is coming in and out etc. We had two LF attacks to scientists had their homes vandalized and one and one instance to two to two cars were vandalized there's a picture right there one. In another case, scientists garage door was spray painted. We had regular instances of home harassment and what I mean regular I mean every single Sunday you could set your clock by it we would experience harassment at individual scientists homes normally three or four scientists in one single day. They travel from one to the other, it was sort of this cat and mouse game they were playing with police. So we had a system that we set up to deal with that. We had a blockade that closed our priming center well closed access to our priming center for an entire day. One at one period and we had construction going on so a cement mixer full of cement, basically the cement hardened and did some significant damage there. We had several event disruptions those were very common we did a speaker series where we would feature scientists, animal scientists human scientists, etc. We had a lot of dark and theater somebody would stand up to start screaming, which is if you're in a theater like that it's a pretty terrifying thing. We had a lot of that we had extensive records request very commonplace and of course I'm a by trade I'm a journalist. I, of course, recognize the need for transparency, especially when we're talking about federal funding, etc. But you know we had some very very large ones we had to deal with. We had legislative challenges. Animal activists were going to our state house and trying to get legislation that impacted us animal rights marches billboards banner drops etc. So many of the billboards would sort of target our staff often you'll see that is that won't necessarily target the public but this is a billboard that was put up near our priming center, certainly media campaigns very commonplace, and then a lot of other kind of attention grabbing actions very similar to I think what what Christine experience at her institutions but every every institution that becomes a primary target sort of goes through this. So, you know, at one point we realize we can't continue to operate this way we'd sort of done what what Christine's institutions thought right we it's typical crisis. So keep your head down it'll blow over, you know, or, or, you know, speak minimally provide some expertise, and then hopefully it'll die down well of course it never does and and those who are opposed to animal research, often recognize that institutions will stay quiet and so they sort of take advantage that they want to sort of create the narrative themselves and I think that's a real as a communicator that's a real, really bad. It's a strategy but also just a bad outcome. So, what did we do our institution we first we reorganized our research communications we created a new position that was specifically in charge of communications about animal research I was actually not the first person that held that role. I was the second, but that person was given a tremendous amount of power and the ability to work very quickly and respond with a moment's notice and also be an expert in that area. We expanded our news coverage of breakthroughs we'd always announced breakthroughs but we made sure that we were very clear about the role of animals and research. We certainly did a lot more internal communications our primary center is on it was on it or still is on a different campus than the main campus so letting our own employees know what we're doing why we're doing it. What do we do to make sure animals are well cared for. We increased certainly increased morale at our center by by trying to get our staff more involved and featuring them one thing I'm tremendously proud of is a lot of the stories we would do we're focused on our animal efforts so they used to, you know, put pumpkins in the outdoor corrals for the monkeys kind of on a regular basis we did a lot of other things like that. But I started asking can we start inviting the public to these things or can we start inviting the press to these things because they're really cool and people should be able to see this so we started to do that. We've always done tours but we expanded the number of tours we did. As I mentioned more tours for the public more employee engagement events. You know, we really wanted the public to understand us and what we were doing and be able to ask questions but we wanted to be the one sort of telling that story and not allowing others to do that for us. So this this sort of strategy. First of all we knew it was working but it sort of it was really put to a test several years later our first infiltration as you remember was approximately 99 1999 2000 the second one came in 2007. And we had been doing all of this work in the meantime tours media outreach, you know, inviting the press and etc. So as a result of that second infiltration we saw a very drastic difference between how the public treated us first of all coverage was incredibly balanced now I will say that we were, you know, when we found out we'd been infiltrated the second time we said come on in talk to us ask any questions. Huge panel of experts answered any questions the public may have. The initial stories and the stories throughout were incredibly, I would say positive for us because we were given a fair shake we were able to defend ourselves show our own videos demonstrate what we were up to. I like the incident in 2000 where that literally I spent years of my life, or many of us did but many of us spent years of our lives, defending ourselves from those allegations back in 2000 this time around. The story sort of evaporated very quickly within days people stopped asking about it they felt comfortable with the answer we'd given the information we provided. Our morale was much better staff felt like we this time came up and defended them and I don't think we did a very good job of that the first time around. One of the way the reasons why that morale was higher as we get people involved I remember one of the allegations was really awful, we had an employee with a hand injury that she she had nerve damage, and activists had accused her of giving shots to animals using that damaged hand and so we had her at the press conference, not not with an animal but demonstrate how she would give a shot with her other hand and you know it was really a personal attack and and she was more than happy to sort of respond to that. You know there was this feeling that our administration was supporting the staff and on the side a couple of images there this was a landing page that we set up or every time new information would come forward we put that on that page one of the things that we were very tremendously proud about is a editorial that was actually written by the newspaper, coming to our defense when they looked at all the data before them they felt like they're the allegations here did not hold up under scrutiny and we thought that was incredibly beneficial to us. So the lessons learned, and I'm going to talk about proactive communications lessons learned and reactive communications lessons are proactive communications, things you do yourself thing you know your programs your outreach etc. And reactive is all responding to often crisis type situation so our proactive communications lessons learned was that we needed to think both externally and internally. Too many institutions only think about public perception they don't think about how their own staff is as dealing with this how are their scientists feeling when they're attacked like like Christine Latin has been and others have been many others have been. How are the your animal care people who sort of become invisible in all of this how do they feel when the institution is not really responding intensely to allegations. You know we started thinking about all the different audiences legislative public neighbors, etc, and making sure that we were talking to all those people in different venues. Recognizing that our employees are strongest ambassadors the people who are working with animals sometimes the often they're sort of faceless you know people don't get to meet the people care for animals the veterinarians the animal care technicians. And just who talk at length about their work with animals and so we sort of took the mask off those people and said hey these are the people that do this work they are good people who care very much about what they do. We, we made sure that all levels of the organization were involved in our, our efforts are community proactive efforts and also our responsive efforts we had legal security communications. You know briefing our top administrators etc getting our eye a cook involved. We wanted to make it sure that employees knew that we had an open door if they had any concerns if they felt like, you know, we weren't doing enough, tell us. We certainly talked to them about hey do you want to be featured we're going to have media coming in are you comfortable with being on camera that happens. We have a lot of creative communications lessons learned for certainly one thing is have a response plan ready have a build this into your crisis plan or create your own plan for dealing with significant allegations or infiltrations those are things that all institutions should consider. Certainly in one really important lesson learned is informing staff before others about negative events if something bad happens make sure your employees are aware and they have a right to ask questions it's it's never fun. There's been other venues not in research where I've learned about major changes as an organization by reading the paper and that's never a fun way to learn about your, your employment or your employer is through that. And then communicate rapidly and remove barriers as we all all of us a lot of us work in or have worked in either academia or in a business setting. And we all know that the bigger the the institution the facility the sort of the slower the communications can go and get the approval process and that needs to be removed to effectively communicate in situations like that, you know, Christine had had some great examples of talking to reporters and writing things on her own and and so she had that ability to quickly respond and institutions need to do that as well the communication staff needs to be able to respond if they're asked a question they know it's false, say right away hey, I'll, I'll happy to provide you information that's not true here's what we do. You know, be able to react very quickly because you may have 20 minutes you may have one hour. You don't have days and days like you used to in the old media style. So I believe that's the end of my slides and I'm gonna pass it on to our next presenter. Thanks, Jim, Wendy. Yeah, I just need to, there we go. There we are. Can you see that? No, not yet. Okay. I'm apparently sharing, but you can't see it. No, maybe stop sharing and share. Yeah, apparently Jim's still sharing. I cannot share while the other participant is sharing. Yeah, I already I did stop sharing. I don't know why it's showing. Let's try it again. That's looking a bit more promising now. Is that working? Yep. Yeah, great. Excellent. So, thank you very much. So I'm just going to talk about the UK experience of openness, and this is for us really focused around our Concordat on openness on animal search in the UK, which was published in May 2014. As a result of public opinion polling that showed that 40% of the UK population said that they needed, they felt they needed more information before they could make up their minds about animals in research. And so we created the Concordat, which is based around four commitments to being more open people organization sign it as an organizational level. And we currently have 126 participant organizations, signatory organizations from right across the spectrum. So you've got lots of universities but also commercial organizations, pharmaceutical companies, funders, charities, and learned societies. I've seen in the UK over the last 10 years is a real step change in the amount of information and the quality of information and the type of information that's available for the public. So, these are just a handful of web pages from Concordat signatories and the point here that I'd like to make is that they all involve imagery. They all involve photographs of the reality of how animals are used and cared for in animal research facilities. Organizations also provide videos. So this is from Cambridge University's website, and it's one of the various videos that they have on their website about this one in particular is the use of marmosets in research into OCD. The other sorts of information that people can get now that they couldn't get before is the statistics about animal research and more than 50 organizations are now providing this sort of information on their website. This is from Oxford University, and it shows the species of animals that they've used in the previous year, the number of those animals they've used, but also the level of harm that those animals experienced. So, as you see on the on the left hand side there from non recovery type experiments through mild moderate severe, and also the number of animals used in research that was subthreshold so it didn't even reach the level of mild suffering. And as I say, we now have about more than 50 organizations, I think they do this maybe 60 this year, whereas before the Concordat nobody was providing this information for the public. We've also created a online tour so that people in an ideal world you take the whole population to see the inside of an animal research facility for themselves so that they could make up their own minds. So that's just not feasible so we have lab animal tour talk which is the URL for that tour. And it gives you the opportunity to look into five UK establishments, and you, you navigate yourself around those tours and there's information videos photographs extra information available for you to access during that tour. I haven't in five minutes got time to show you all the media coverage that's been generated since the Concordat but this is just a couple of examples from national newspapers, where the public and this is from the Sun newspaper which is not a very high brown newspaper. It's really aimed at our target audience of the general public that isn't terribly science literate. And it provides as you can see lots of information and photographs and the reality of how animals are used. And just another one other example of photographs showing animals that have been used in research into paralysis. Each year we publish a report a progress report on the Concordat. And this is the latest one that's just been published and you can find it on our website. But interestingly here this is just some we produce a big infographic as part of the report each year. But this shows you that one of the most in most popular subjects for signatories to communicate the public about is around the around the three hours so the reduction refinement replacement of the use of animals and research that's something that people are really interested in, and that signatories want to tell people about. But you can also see there, the numbers of signatories engaging in in different ways of communicating with the public. And these are just some other statistics of how people have communicated internally and also externally providing information online. So it's yes it's 63 signatories provided details and the number and species of animals used in their institution. And this has been really popular. People did wait and see how it went in the UK first but there are now 10 openness agreements transparency agreements, mainly in Europe, but also in Australia and New Zealand. And as we've been hearing, soon there will be a similar agreement in the US. By having our openness agreement, we haven't stopped the fact that there are campaigns against the use of animals research in the UK. What has changed is the the way that people have responded to those campaigns. And so what you have here is on the top left hand side, there is an ongoing campaign against the use of dogs in research and breeding dogs for that research. And this is photography provided by that that facility that's under attack, if you like, to show the reality of how those animals live in their facility something that that just wouldn't have happened before the concordat. There was that sort of put your head down and pretend it'll go away but now people are coming out and providing the information. Another campaign is against the use of the force swim test so on the bottom left you have the fact sheet that we produced with three other learners societies in the UK to explain where the force swim test is useful and where it really shouldn't be used. And on the right hand side of this slide. This is a letter that was published in the Times newspaper in the summer of 2021. And this was in August when everyone was on holiday, but we still managed to pull together I think it's 17 other organizations that were willing to come join with us and write a letter to the to a national newspaper, calling for support for the facility that was being campaigned against public opinion in the UK remains relatively high. The acceptance of the use of animals and research, and that's the word we use its acceptance not do you like it do you want it do you want more of it. It's, can you accept the use of animals and research. And as you can see, it's, it's still at around 68%. The last time this was measured which unfortunately hasn't been since 2018. I did know what we were seeing in 2018 was as well as that 68% saying that they could agree with the statement that they could accept the use of animals in research, as long as it complies with the law, as long as there's no unnecessary suffering and there's no alternative. What we were, what we were seeing was the public were feeling that animal research facilities were becoming less secretive. So the number who thought animal research facilities were secretive was dropping, and the percentage the public felt well informed, not just informed but well informed about animal research in the UK was slowly rising. And I'll finish there. Thank you. Thanks Wendy Eva. Thank you. If you could pull up my slides. I have a few slides to great. I'm going to talk about, as we engage in the US Openness Initiative, some key strategies, strategic approaches to succeed in this new process for one. I think this has already been emphasized yesterday with our presentation from doctors Newsom and Thompson Irritani with polling, that it is important for us as we engaged in increasingly open communication to be aware of obviously public opinion trends on animal research. It's also important to closely follow both positive and negative national media coverage trends, as well as have a good grasp of existing national education campaigns that support humane and ethical animal research, as well as those that educational campaigns that we might call propaganda here in the research community that oppose animal research that is humane, oppose it in any event, in any situation. So I'm just going to, we got a wonderful overview yesterday of polling from doctors Newsom and Thompson Irritani. The foundation for biomedical research does some polling which largely is largely similar to what they showed yesterday. I want to emphasize this one poll finding and we're going to be doing more polls along these lines from our 2022 poll with Hopkins Medicine. We asked participants whether they were aware that there are veterinary specialists who care for animals in biomedical research, and 67% were unaware that such specialists exist, which was a surprise to us, and only 21% were aware. And I, you know, we're going to dig it more into this in our next poll to see whether the general population is aware of the three different things that go into animal welfare the different components. But overall our impression is that the general public is not very much not very aware of the field of lab animal science what it entails and what it is. So again, I'm still going over the landscape here. So not much public awareness about what this community does overall. Also, we have to be there are a lot of campaigns that are targeting animals and research. There are different reasons sometimes there are situations where mistakes have been made and the research community really strives to excel in the care of animals but there have been situations where welfare violations have occurred and some of these campaigns against animal research are triggered by that. Others are triggered by just beliefs, very extreme beliefs that there should be no animal research. I think previous talks have talked about all of this. And we just need to be aware that for these different reasons there currently are strong campaigns that are opposed to canine research and non human primate research and the media coverage has not facilitated this matter as you can see with the screenshot of the nature article how wild monkeys laundered for science could undermine research. And then above that the sort of symbolic image of the dog destined for research with the his ear tattooed there. So, we will, it's great, and we should continue to increase our openness in communication about animal research. But we have to be careful, and we have to be mindful of these types of information campaigns that try to say the opposite essentially of what we're saying. For this, we must make sure that what we present in our public education campaigns and our media interviews is scientifically and factually accurate, backed up by peer reviewed references for every statistic that we provide. And while what constitutes inflammatory non inflammatory is up for debate there's something subjective about it but we can all agree in general on what an inflammatory images in an animal research lab versus a non inflammatory one and I won't go into detail but another thing that we need to keep in mind as we get into this, this openness movement that is that is taking a hold and that is going to help increase, increase confidence in science is the tone of the news stories that come out. Like I said earlier news stories in form education campaigns both for and against animal research the media has a pivotal role I think it's been mentioned by other speakers yesterday. I forget who said the great point that talking to the media is like talking to the public I think it was Paul McKellips. And so, here is a screenshot of the foundations media database I know that amp and other groups have the same thing. This is one of the features where you can see the sentiment of the news stories. This is the fan stories about the foundation for biomedical research but the point is that you want the stories when you talk to the media you want the stories that come out to look like that upward curve where it's a positive sentiment, and not where neutral is what you don't want is the downward curve. And how do you do that well as a scientist you have to find out who you're about to talk to because once you talk to them you are going to be quoted for the most part. So what topics does that journalist cover what organizations do they typically are frequently quoted site, and what are their specific areas of interest. Based on that, you can make an informed decision, you should respond it is important to be open, but you can make an informed decision about whether to provide a statement or whether to provide a live phone interview. A lab tour and additional information. You just have to know who you will be talking to. So, my takeaways are that I'm excited about the openness movement, the benefits that I see are that we are finally moving to a proactive rather than a reactive approach to public education and media about this, this topic that is so near and dear to all of us and has been kept sort of under a lid if you will. I also think the openness approach is a way to foster and build trust, you can't earn trust if you don't give trust, and also also it's a wonderful opportunity for members of the community to collaborate more together and communicate more and not create these silos that contribute to the culture of secrecy. Basically, I just wanted to say, you know, the things to the strategic advice I have is just to stay on top of public opinion as we engaged in as we engage in further openness, stay on top of media sentiment and media sentiment with friends, these databases that we have that the advocacy groups have almost every college university public relations office has, and you can gauge with these curves if you set it up correctly how your public sentiment is going for the media interviews you're giving. You have to be ready for criticism and push back these information or misinformation campaigns, whatever we want to call them against canine and non human primate research are real. They weren't there they are. And find your own voice this has been reiterated multiple times before by other great speakers here and for that you have, of course, the community which with the openness agreement will be able to support each other in finding its own voice. And you also have the advocacy groups and your communications department. So I think I will leave it at that. Thanks, Eva. Great, thank you. Fantastic advice, as usual. It was really great to to hear, you know, this this, you know, different sort of perspective as perspectives of openness from from a scientist thank you Christine from an institutional perspective as shared by Jim. And then from what's happening over in the UK so thanks Wendy. So we've got a lot of great questions that have come in and we're all interested in different aspects of this this topic and we all have different experience with this topic so I think first we're going to pull up a poll to find out from you all where along the spectrum of openness that you've had personal experience. And as we're waiting for that poll to come up. And this could be, you know, you, your personal experience your experience with your institution, you know, however you want to interpret that but zero experience with openness would be. You have no experience with any information provided outside of those involved in research, which might be impossible to achieve if you're publishing work and things like that but you know that would be zero and 100% would be, you have experience in all information about every aspect of the research or research institution or work and research that you're involved with is shared. And our little description says, all the way to personal health information, you know your address and everything else so take a few minutes to fill that out so we could see where everybody is on the spectrum of openness. It's just experience so it doesn't it's not it could be positive negative neutral. It's just your experience. Okay, and I think once we stop seeing numbers coming in we could probably end the poll and see or see what we see. So thank you all for participating that, and it looks pretty even it looks like we have, you know, those that that responded to the poll are along the spectrum of openness so you know from from very little experience with openness to lots of experience with openness and and that's typical. That's pretty much where we are as individuals here in the United States and as institutions so thank you for for helping with that and that really is a reflection on on where we are in the United States. So we're going to start answering some questions. Let me bring up our question panel, and I also encourage speakers panelists that you know just presented if you have questions for each other. All you have to do if you're online is raise your hand and we'll make sure to get those in as well. Okay, so our first question that came in is actually for Dr. Latin. What do the harassment campaigns focus on now after you've changed your tactic and become more communicative about the work that you do. Yeah, so that's an interesting question. I do see that sometimes the campaigns are actually kind of rehashing some of the same information but trying to find new audiences. So for example when I moved to Louisiana from Connecticut, there was kind of a big uptick at that point in, you know, the newsletters that were sent out and press releases that were sent to local media and some of the Louisiana State University kind of student media outlets I think hoping to kind of get a new audience for some of the same types of messages that had been tried previously. One of the other things that has shifted over the just you know from my postdoc to my faculty position is that you know at my postdoc position I was at Yale, which is private institution. I'm at LSU which is a public university and there have I've seen a lot more of these kinds of like open records requests and we're actually also currently dealing with some legal efforts to try to get access to my unpublished research materials so there's been a little bit of a shift away from some of the I would say more kind of like, you know, newsletters specifically targeting specific aspects of my research although there's still some of that and more of a shift towards some of these potential open records requests and those types of things. Thank you so much. This question is for Jim. Can you do you know, okay, can you comment on the Oregon State Laws on FOIA request. Specifically, are there any protections for researchers or yeah. Sure. You know, I think one of our presenters mentioned this previously but there is a tremendous I think it might have been Nicole there is a tremendous amount of transparency in the US when it comes to public records so there's you know certainly FOIA which is federal and then there's state records but you know most states are really quite open in regards to what you can obtain a tremendous amount of information especially for of course public institutions. As for the question so it really does vary but Oregon would definitely be one of those states that is sort of on the spectrum of being incredibly transparent. While I was at OHSU again this was, you know, probably 10 years ago but during that time, we were having heavy targeting of our individuals that work with larger animals so people who worked with with non human primates, etc. And they were being targeted on a very personal level, you know, that's when we had the home harassment, the vandalizing of the houses and cars and things like that so we went to our legislature and said listen, we believe we should certainly maintain transparency but at the same time campaigns targeting individuals private people who don't have security and who are being harassed at home or having their houses vandalized etc. Is there something we can do to help protect them and so we worked with the legislature and came up with an exemption where people who work with large animals when when their records were requested from our institution. We were able to redact their name so you had all of the information about the research they were doing the treatment of animals etc but we just remove the name simply because certainly those who oversee animal research the USDA etc have access to all of that information. But private citizens or individuals who specifically want to use this to weaponize campaigns against individual people, they lost some access to that and and so that that was something that was created years ago, I believe it still is an existence I haven't lived in Oregon for 10 years now so I believe that still exists and we thought it was a really good sort of way to maintain a vast amount of transparency but sort of take away some of the ability to go after individuals involved in science because really this should be a discussion about research as a whole, not about one individual person I personally think that's a really bad strategy to go after individuals and I really hope that all the groups that are that do that will reconsider that that strategy because I think it's kind of a losing strategy. And it, you know, just, it's, it's also pretty, pretty appalling to tell you the truth. Thank you so much Jim. This question is for Wendy. Is the Concordat gathering and present presentation of data funded by the UK government. So is the Concordat funded by the government, not directly. Concordat is funded well we as an organization carry out all the administration around the Concordat the individual signatories do their own work and and they will cover the costs of that although that's often not a very expensive thing for them to be doing. We do have Concordat signatories that are part of government. So some of the, some of the agencies of government have signed the Concordat. And then we do get funding via the UK research councils UK research and innovation, give us some funding each year to support the Concordat and when it was set up for the first few years we had funding from the welcome specifically to support it. And that was the reason that those organizations want to support it is they don't want us to have to charge a large amount of money for people to sign the Concordat they don't want barriers. And they don't want that to be an issue for for organization so we do have some very small medical research charities, and we want to encourage them to be able to join up and so that's why that that funding is important, but no it's not a project that's done by government. Okay, wonderful. Thank you. This question is for all of you. And actually Nicole, I encourage you to chime in by just unmuting since you're sitting right over there if you feel so moved to do so. Okay, the question is for all of you are is there going to be a concerted effort across multiple institutions to be more transparent and aligned on how they communicate their animal research. At my institution we've been engaged in convincing leadership to be more transparent, but it still feels like the places that are willing to be open are the exception. I think that safety and numbers element can go a long way to help reduce understandable institutional, you know, fears or anxieties or hesitations to opening and becoming more vulnerable. So could this be achieved through some official mandate to provide annual reports on animal research. So there's lots in there and there's lots that is happening so I didn't know if anybody wanted to comment on all or or certain pieces of that. Could I start on that. That'd be great. Yeah, just because exactly that that was exactly why we organize the Concordat the way we did it was that safety and numbers idea. Before the Concordat there were maybe one or two institutions one or two individuals in the UK that were prepared to talk about their animal research. And so what we felt was that we needed to have a good number of institutions signed up before we published it. And we had 72 organizations when we first published it and as I said there are now 126. And the UK is a small country so that is effectively it's more or less 90% plus of all the institutions in the UK that that carry out animal research or that fund animal research or that have members who carry out or fund animal research. So we have now, we really have got that critical mass, that safety in numbers. And after 10 years we're now in a position where the question is not why aren't you know it's sort of why are these organizations that haven't signed. Why haven't they signed. What is it that they're doing that so awful they can't talk about it. Why. And so those are going to interestingly I mentioned about that we still do have campaigns against the use of animal research in the UK that hasn't gone away. But generally speaking, they tend to be focused on organizations that haven't signed the Concordat. And this isn't cool I can speak a little bit too to that's exactly what we're hoping to achieve with the US arrow initiative. And also we know that that's a challenge for many who want to be more open but their institutional leadership is, you know, is is hesitant or is enough for a move that they're not quite there yet is, we want to be able to do that so that's our our goal and bringing in the exemplars and then working with each other to provide resources to be able to have those conversations with leadership and our goal is to get to a place like what Wendy was just saying where, you know, it really makes more sense to be open than it does to not. So that is the goal. I just want to point out that with Wendy you remind us this all the time but we do have a lot of institutions in the United States that are doing something with openness. And Nicole shared a lot of examples of that whether it could be a statement on your website giving tours or visiting classrooms or whatever it is so so that's a wonderful thing. So we just need to increase the number of institutions more consistently doing together and know that each other are doing it so it doesn't feel like you're alone. So Jim has something to add. Yeah, I just have one quick thing to add to that is my experience in sort of working at an institution that I greatly expanded openness was the analogy I'd like to provide is a little bit like a vaccination is that I realize that when we were talking about what we did defining what we did showing how we cared for animals introducing the public to the people who work with animals. You know the public wanted to hear those that information they wanted to learn more and so it helped us the next time we faced a major challenge which was our next infiltration was because the public already knew a lot about us we weren't some mysterious facility sort of behind you know in the woods there we'd we'd invited a lot of the members of the public in we did a lot of news stories reporters came to us all the time did tons of tours. So, you know, I really consider it like a vaccination and you know I think there's sort of a this belief that if you don't say anything if you don't talk about what you do you're automatically safe and I think that institutions tend to forget that there's a tremendous amount of transparency already there's records request there's USDA inspections, there's, you know, any letters you may need to send to OLA there, there are your, there's PubMed, there's publications there's funding documents etc. And so the question is, do you want to allow those who are opposed to take all that information and tell their own story or are you interested in telling the story yourself. So it's just, I think it's kind of a fable that there's this ability to stay quiet, and things will be quiet, nothing will happen when in reality, tremendous amount of information is about you is already out there and so why not be the ones to gather those pieces together and tell the story. Awesome. Another question. And this is for any of the panelists. What have any of you experienced to be the biggest forces against openness what has been their biggest arguments. Can I speak to that one I actually this sort of just builds on what Jim was just saying where one of the things I think that's really surprised me was that, you know, sometimes some of the biggest opponents to openness about animal research is their scientists. And I think it's for the reason, I mean a very understandable reason right that, you know, some of these scientists are afraid of becoming a target of harassment right. And I think, you know, exactly as Jim was just saying, you know, if you are a scientist, it is clear that you are doing animal research because you publish papers about that research and you present that research at conferences and you present it at social seminars and, you know, it's out there right and there are also, you know, depending on your funding sources and your institution like yeah there are these records requests and things like that so this information about animal research is available even if you're not posting on social media about it or talking to journalists are doing outreach right. And I think Jim is absolutely right that it's really important that you think about okay well this information is available like, how do you want to communicate about the work that you're doing. And, you know, I really think that animal research is a privilege and not a right and part of our responsibility in doing this work with animals is to communicate about it communicate how it's done, why it's done. And what are the results of it that that that can benefit not just people but also animals themselves right. So, you know, I really think there's a really strong ethical reason for openness and not just kind of a practical reason for openness and you know the public pays for a lot of the work that we do right and so there's also another reason to make sure that we're communicating about what it is that we're doing and what are we learning and you know how is this all moving science forward. Right, so I think, you know, I really think when when I talk to scientists and they say oh I never tell people that I do animal research and this and that I think, I think you have to really kind of. Yeah, you have to make the case to those folks and just lay it all out there and be like you know you're your silence will not protect you right like it's it's it's you gotta you gotta actually talk about it and be willing to engage with it and be willing to advocate for it right because otherwise I think you know if not you then who right. Yeah, yeah. And certainly when when we were setting up the Concordat in the UK, the biggest barrier was the fear of what would be the results. And we did have to take a lot of faith you know we, a lot of people had to put a lot of trust in the idea that this project was going to help things. And I think it is interesting it was two years later after our Concordat was published that Spain, Spain was the next country that did one and I think they they probably did wait to see what the results were in the UK and I did spend a lot of time in those years going around with lots of other people trying to encourage other countries to follow the what we followed in this direction and the message really was look you know nothing bad has happened. Obviously we can't promise that nothing bad will ever happen. We do still have protest and campaigns and that's fine that's part of living in a democracy. And it's useful to have that challenge. But what we need is to be able to provide the public with our side of the story, which they haven't had for so many years. All this information and all the videos and all the imagery have been put out there by people who are opposed to animal research and it's horrible to look at. And you know that's not the truth. So, just go ahead and put that information out there for the public. And it's it. We published with 72 organizations and we've had another 50 plus who joined in the intervening years again, some institutions waited to see. They just waited to see what would happen. But we have continually had more institutions joining. So I would say the biggest barrier is that fear but I hope that our experience in the UK and the experience of other European countries and now Australia and New Zealand as well is that, you know, do this and still nothing bad has happened. And just to quickly add the fear and I this is an interesting, there's probably also the fear is probably also based on do we have the right resources, information and strategic advice to do this. And I don't know the answer to that, but I think that is part of the reason for the fear which is part of the reason for the reluctance. I have a question for Nicole maybe Wendy Nicole you presented a spectrum to compassion. Where we're going. Is there something when we do these initiatives that leads to greater passion for what we do so go past compassion for what we do and actually have passion for what we do. How will your organization do it and how did it work with the UK. That's a really, that's a fantastic question and I love it. I honestly, I don't know that I have a good answer to it. I can say that our passion so when we, when I know for me and I know I've experienced this because I can get very passionate and excited. I think when we're talking passionately, we're not answering questions we're not in an inquisition but we're really excited about it that that passion can be contagious. So I think that that's, that's one of the ways I sometimes can get carried away I'm just speaking for myself my own experiences but I can be talking to. I like to now I feel a little more comfortable talking about what I do you know there, some of us can be constrained just by institutional lines and things like that and now that I'm kind of a free agent. I feel like I can speak very freely about what I'm doing I can't, you know I have proprietary things are proprietary is probably not a good word anymore but like, you know there's there's certain trade secrets I can't just to talk about but like just my enthusiasm for what I'm doing I feel I can be much more open about, and I will you know as I'm giving blood or something I'll talk about how my dogs a blood donor and he was part of a program that developed treatments for this. You know, I think that our when we're talking very passionately about it, and we're just very excited about what we're doing that that can be contagious, and that can really spread. And people can feel that and even when they're like, I'm not sure how I feel about this but this person's really excited about it, it can help you know get them to really understand why we're passionate and possibly even be passionate about the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. Hope that's useful. There's a lot about openness, but at the same time, there is an increasing push in our government for research security. And in fact, we see contracts that come in for funding a certain projects that do have restrictive terms on them. You know a drug company doesn't want you to sell their drug for them that they want to control that so their restrictions on what you can say about your research in certain areas. And in more research, I haven't seen any animal research at our institution that's coming in as controlled unclassified information. CUI which has very strict terms about dissemination, and then our institution does not do classified research but many do I have no idea if there's any classified animal research out there. If you talk about that research and you go to jail. So there are restrictions out there you have to be aware of in terms of funding a particular project so it's not just all one sided. Thank you so much yeah it's definitely not one size fits all. We have to wrap up so I didn't I just wanted to provide the opportunity for the panelists to if you have any last thoughts or any last comments you'd like to share before we end this session. Can I just come back on that passion point. Because I think it's, it may not be exactly what you term passion but one thing that we were we were surprised by with the Concordat was the competition that it that it caused in that we were just grateful that people were signing it. What we didn't expect was the signatories to be competing against each other to be the most open and to come up with the new ideas and a new way of doing things and we have a an award ceremony every year. Where we recognize and celebrate the great work that people are doing and the competition for those awards is fierce now. And things that are being submitted. Now, if they've been submitted. Eight years ago they definitely won, but we've moved on so much that everyone's doing that now so it's not really worth an award so that the envelope is in pushed every year. And that that aspect of passion I think we've been quite surprised by pleasantly surprised by. I just like to add that there's the internal benefits of something that sort of surprised me about transparency and sensation is that you know employees like it when their leadership says we want you to talk about what you do we want to feature your work. We're proud of you we're. And so I think that's something to think about. Often when we're thinking about transparency year we're discussing how the public will respond to it how legislators will respond. We don't think about our own employees and I think the message that we send by kind of keeping everything quiet and telling people, don't talk about what you do. I think that sends a message to a really negative message to employees so I would say that think about that other benefit it's a it's sort of a secondary benefit, but it's also a really important thing to think about. Thanks everyone thanks to all the panelists for a great talk and around openness.