 So, welcome everybody. It's 7.30 here in Vienna, Austria, and welcome to this session of MetaScience Conference 21. It's a session on the communication of open science, which is maybe more an epistemological dimension of meta science. And here, especially today, we want to speak about lessons learned during this ongoing pandemic with the major shift towards more openness in research and open science activities. So, before the pandemic, if you like, those activities were mostly discussed within academia, such as preprints or open access. But now they came to public attention and some of them provided several grounds for controversy around communication and trust of scientific authority and evidence. So these controversies, on the other hand, laid open the stage to observe how policymakers, for example, or public discourse in more general, were integrating scientific knowledge in the making. That's knowledge that comes with a lot of uncertainty. And on this roundtable today, we are gathering today for dear colleagues to discuss exactly this issue, how to best open and communicate knowledge in the making, how to deal with uncertainty stemming from real time science that has to answer societal challenges in an open way. So hello to my colleagues. We all met as mentors and fellows during the five year fellowship program fires vision free knowledge or open knowledge translated hosted by the Wikimedia Germany Foundation, which had the aim to foster open science among interdisciplinary early career researchers. And I guess you agree with me it was a lot of fun. It was an outstanding experience. And so we also wrote some things together I we prepared a link for an article that we prepared that we wrote together we put it later into the chat. And so, yeah, welcome on this virtual stage, Nate, Nate Brenzau, a sociologist currently at the University of Bremen in Germany hi Nate, Yana Lasser, a computational social scientists at Graz University of Technology and also the complexity Hi Yana in Austria. And then we have Tamara Heck, and Sylvia Kuhlmann, both of you are education and information researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Research and information in education in Germany. So hello Tamara hello Sylvia. And my name is Katja Meyer and I come from science and technology studies at the University of Vienna in Austria. So we do not have any slides. As I said we'll post relevant links to the chat while we speak. And the idea for this one hour session is first to discuss on the panel to questions and then lead an open discussion with the audience about the lessons learned from opening research activities in the making in times of a global pandemic so please use the chat also for your questions use chat or Q&A. And we, I would, if there are no further questions I would like to immediately come to the first question that we have prepared to ourselves to answer to kind of trigger the debate a little bit and and this first question on the round table is to you, my colleagues. Do you all experienced struggles and controversies in your own research, making it open, but also in in kind of opening of research in the public more generally. And I think it would be great to start if you could give an example of such a controversy and elaborate a bit why you think those forms of research openness lead to these controversial reactions. And Sylvia, would you like to start. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much Katja for this very nice introduction. It's a pleasure for me to be here with you all today. I have an example very interesting one I think. Let's start with Heinsberg, maybe somebody of you heard already of Heinsberg it's, yeah, it's about openness that is as far as I know very unique and with regard to the communication of scientific results to the public. Especially if it's a source of many controversial reactions in both worlds in science and in public. Yeah, first of all, a few words about background, the setting is covered in the beginning of 2020 in a small village near Heinsberg in Germany, it's located in a rural area of North Rhine-Westphalia. Every year, the whole of North Rhine-Westphalia celebrates carnival with great enthusiasm and it's given the same importance I think to the ones in Venice and Brazil, it's really famous there. Yeah, and in February 2020, we now all know that most things concerning COVID were unclear and nobody of us I think could have ever imagined what would have happened in the upcoming month. And because of its social relevance, this is important all carnival events took place in Heinsberg and all over Germany, but in Heinsberg as well. And regardless of COVID and unfortunately one of the happy parties there turned out to be a so-called super spreader event and as a result, a huge number of people with positive there in Heinsberg will therefore definitely go down in history as the first grade COVID outbreak in Germany. Yeah, scientists, that is a bad side and now scientists immediately took advantage of this opportunity and they used the district as a kind of a case study in this uncertain phase of this emerging pandemic. It wasn't a pandemic at that point of time, but it was emerging and yeah, it happened in the end. And this was called this place, Heinsberg was considered to be perfect to study the behavior of the virus in detail. And so a group of scientists following Hendrik Strieg, this is a famous German viral list and an HIV researcher. He started a COVID research project there and this was funded by the government of not trying to failure in the main part. And part of his strategy was to test nearly every resident for the virus and Strieg tried to apply the results there to the whole of Germany. I could now speak out about all the questions and uncertainties that have been discussed publicly by other scientists regarding the Heinsberg study, but this is not what I want to focus on today. I'm interested in the whole of the research and how it was communicated to the public and this was really, really special and unique, I think, because for the first time, as far as I know, a PR agency was used to present the project. Strieg engaged a story machine. This is a company which is funded by Kai Diekwan and this man is a former editor of the German Yellow Press newspaper Bild, which is quite famous in Germany. And he explained that each one to document the work of his team and show how science works. And one of the most important goals he stated was to make everything transparent and clear to the public and documentation was also done or was done in social media in main parts under the term the Heinsberg protocol, the Heinsberg protocol, maybe some of you heard of that. At the same time, and this is very interesting at this point. The prime minister of North Australia is Armin Laschet, he's currently running for the position of the German chancellor and elections here in Germany on Sunday. He strongly encouraged the lifting of lockdown and he did that during the press conference in spring 2020 and at the same time at this press conference, Strieg and his team presented the intermediate results of the performed study. In the aftermath of all of that, more and more details regarding the work of story machine came to light and particularly interesting. That was the fact that story machine had developed a very sophisticated communication concept, especially for facts that spoke in favor of ending the lockdown. And yeah, well, this of course may raised many, many questions among these who finance the work of story machine, for example. Additionally, it was also questioned if the results of such a project were reliable, when it was funded by government that wanted strongly to release COVID restrictions and at the same time, the same project was promoted by PR agency, which was headed by a former yellow press. John, this we know for influence reporting. Yeah, it in the end it wasn't if this is a kind of contracted research in the sense of payment for the side result. Yeah, another point is, one could argue that we face here an example of open washing, which is when the whole project and the results are promoted as open science, but it's actually the opposite. And unfortunately, and this is the big point, all this, the whole affair has thrown a bad light on science as a whole in Germany. Many non scientists and I experienced that in personal talks as well, have asked themselves if they can really trust these highly educated people in science and in politics, or if they were making fools of them. And this is, I think, really a big problem that we face here. Yeah, I think that's a really good and very big starting example of what can go wrong. You mentioned open washing already. But then of course we are settled in a in a time where there is conflicting interests, but also facts are not very certain. So there are a lot of diverging facts. We don't have a lot of information about what's going on. And then of course this can put bad light on science as it is then regarded as science by press conference, and especially by people that know how to change public opinion that that are very professional. And you can cover it from both sides, right? It can be actually a good move to have people who know to deal with public opinion on the grand scale in such processes, but maybe not in that constellation. Yeah, but then anyway, so diverging facts right is also a big problem, not being sure what information is the right one. And so, who wants to add another example now, maybe Nate? Yeah, I think I could just comment. And I still haven't decided is the best translation open washing or open laundering. Laundering sounds more sinister in English maybe. Anyways, to exploit the idea of open science. But yeah, I mean, in this there was more intention, because there was this story machine, this PR thing going on. I think in the US, early on, we see an interesting case where there was maybe not much intention and maybe not a lot of organization. And so things, and we're talking about why the public sort of can react with a lot of mistrust suddenly or develop this mistrust right and, you know, the CDC got the gene sequences for testing were available and so the CDC tried to reduce test kits and really kind of botched this effort. And at some level that should be okay that should also be part of open science and open communication like there will be mistakes there will be, you know, some percentage of null hypotheses rejected even though they're true etc right but they they didn't really take good responsibility for that it was just like oh, you know, the test kits don't work and and, and then there was this mask and no mask this this was in a country's to I'm just sort of using the US as an example but it was kind of like, Oh, you don't need to wear a mask yes you do need to wear a mask and there was not a lot of information behind these decisions the decisions would just kind of happen. And it and it happened again recently with vaccinated people need to wear a math don't need to wear a math need to wear a mask. And I think that part of part of the problem was just sort of this this lack of taking responsibility right so it's just like the public could have the impression that oh every week they're just kind of saying a new thing. And this this really leads to sort of an evaporation of trust and especially when, if there's a mistake made you know, why, why was it made, you know, and again in the communication direction mistakes are part of science and that that, you know, the politicians sort of want to hang somebody for a mistake okay that's sort of normal politics but mistakes are part of science and so taking responsibility for them simply just means what happened you know that this is part of the scientific process. But I think there was a lot of mistrust really early on and of course we won't turn this into a panel on politics but in the German case in the in the Heinzberg study when sleek had this this this the science by press conference really in a press conference, you know, the politicians are there. And in the US example I mean we had this daily press conferences and the politicians were there. And often the information was conflicting, you know the the scientists would say one thing the politicians would say another thing and even the media might say a third thing so no wonder the public had trouble trusting in this case. Absolutely. I think that's also a very good example of how important it is to discuss now, maybe better channels of communication dealing with knowledge that is not finished that is in the making. And one particular example for example who have been preprints right suddenly they produced a rush into science from people from non scientists or maybe scientists from other domains to try to find out about the situation for example the mask and no mask thing I mean they were using and diverging scientific papers on that too right so there was a lot of different evidence. So, yeah maybe we can go on a little bit more in this direction and maybe Tamara you want to add something here. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I want to give an example with specifically the preprints in research and it might have been a research intern conflict before covert only so only research intern because we had preprint servers before covert and in different disciplines there are great differences I think, but we had them and the preprints are generally not peer reviewed. And when covert started the other preprints as Cathy already said preprints and even this peer review process got into public and people got got known about those in the media, and I had the feeling and that was my intention to work this kind of paper about the lessons learned. I had the feeling that the media reported about a preprints kind of negatively, and that the that some people reported to me out. It's not it's bad research it's just a preprint why are the researchers doing this. And this I find this where we said because this preprints as a thing that leads to or that belongs to the open science practice practices in my opinion so you can publish your results as early as possible and you can share it with intention main intention is to share it with a research as you put it on a preprint server and other researchers can read it can give feedback can peer review it maybe even openly peer reviewing it. Though that's a positive thing on the first hand. But the other thing we have and this got that in the public as well doing code is that we don't have this quality check and the peer reviewing isn't a process and research to check on to prove the quality of research. And it might be so preprints and peer review might be a bit of contradicting so they don't. They don't go together either you do preprint first or you you're getting a peer refute first and submit your your paper for example to a traditional publisher to journal. So both processes either peer reviewing or preprint have their pros and cons so either you you share your knowledge as early as possible or you do the quality check first. And this might be an research intern conflict but in the public. The public didn't know about those processes within research and so it was rather see negatively those processes and I'm not sure if the public was understood what what's behind this idea of preprints and sharing research and might be an example for my experience so what what does a researcher do now to do open practices. We recently uploaded a preprint we had some study and with include some code and we uploaded this as a preprint the article. At the same time we did the submission submitted the article to a traditional journals or we did it in parallel. And peer review was very quick, not where we. It was comprehensive but it was quick and it criticized that the code had some, some error and the article was rejected. Without any discussion that says and but at the same time luckily we received a kind of open peer review at our preprint and a colleague told us or detected the call the code error as well and suggested a solution. And yeah we we changed the code and and yeah good good good public the right code and did a re-editing our articles or we got a positive feedback and I guess it's even good because the research of this open peer review even can get some acknowledgement because you can see her corrections online with the preprint and for me that's a possible positive experience. Yeah, and it would be necessary also to maybe train the media also a little bit more on these processes that happen in science and and how knowledge is produced and how it is kind of legitimized as well and how it is proved. I think those things are really important, but then on the other hand, and I remember what the other you told us when we met first to discuss this panel. Then on the other hand why it you have to be really careful with opening up your research in the making, especially when you deal with, for example, measures around COVID simulating different policy measures and their effects on society. And there your your research even if it's not finished and not everything is kind of super tightly and robust peer reviewed. There is a need to to kind of constantly develop this knowledge also to help policymakers if they want to hear and listen to this evidence. But then also if you publish those things in preprints, for example, but also in other formats, this might have a huge impact on on society and on the policy policy measures themselves. So I remember you were telling us a little bit about this so maybe you want to elaborate here as well your experiences in that regard. Yeah, we have a very strange noise on your on your mic. Maybe you you can try again. There's like a whisper. Yeah, it's not really working. It's like a really weird feedback. It's getting more alien, more and more alien. Now it works. Now it works. Yes, very well. The third microphone. Okay. Sorry about that. We tested but apparently not enough. So yeah, just tell me when it becomes alien again. So I guess what I can contribute to this discussion is kind of the insight perspective from the early covid crisis research. And back in early March 2020 we were sitting at the complexity science hub doing our usual research stuff and then this this covid thing started brewing. In the afternoon in the office, we started making projections for Austria. So basically, what we did is we looked at the case numbers, and when we did an extrapolation into the future assuming exponential growth, what that's what you assume for growth of a pandemic. We had the numbers for Italy, which, which already had this huge outbreak so the numbers for the percentage of people being hospitalized and the percentage of people dying, which were rather high in Italy because the hospital system there was was overwhelmed very early on. The action showed that basically end of April, the Austrian intensive care capacities would be exhausted and after that people would start dying in the thousands. And we were sitting there, looking at this projection was just a simple plot it was basically a straight line of the projected case numbers crossing a horizontal line that indicated the ICU capacity. And like, okay, what do we do with this, like if we go public with this, there is a high chance to cause a panic because people will be like, Oh my God, we're going to die one month from now and we will buy lots of toilet paper before that. And on the other hand we were like, but we need to show this, at least to the politicians so they can act because at that point in time nobody was acting in Austria. And we were discussing back and forth like how do we go about this. And also as was already mentioned, I mean the error bars on these numbers were huge. We had the numbers for Italy but it was only to me right one case. So it was very hard to like draw error bars on this projection. Well, and then in the end what we decided is that yeah we, we just communicate this we communicated it both for the politicians and over Twitter, which was then picked up by media we were also not the only scientists communicating that to be fair. We kind of overestimated our importance nobody panic. And politicians acted probably not only because of us, because of the general like the sentiment at the time. But I think the discussion we had at that point in time was very worthwhile, because we really went through like what could happen and then in the end we decided that we as scientists it's not our, our role to kind of hide this information and make this decision for the public. And we decided to be as transparent as we can also communicating where the uncertainties are and to the best of our knowledge communicating, like the, the error bars of this projection, and just, yeah, letting the public decide what to do with that, then, in the end. So that was how we resolved it for us, but it was not, not such an easy discussion to have. I can imagine, and that would fit perfectly to the second question that we have prepared, which is how can we better communicate communicate those open research practices to the public, and the different sectors in the public and I think the conversation you had among your, your group, your research team, produced some interesting ways to go about this right to to find maybe solutions on potential interfaces to this knowledge, which would be cool if you would share them with us. Kind of, I mean, this kind of discussions continued for us because we were engaged in much more COVID research after that. And what we kind of found out for ourselves is that just being open with the data or the code is not enough. It needs to be contextualized and it needs to be explained. And in the best case even targeted and package differently for different audiences. And that's not a trivial task that requires time, and it also requires some kind of professionalism and not every researcher is cut out to do that from the get go. So, at the complexity science up, we were very lucky to have a visualization scientists, a resident visualization scientist who's like research job it is to develop good representations of information. The person Johannes Saga, he did a great job in creating many information products that we kind of wanted to communicate and also gave us a great opportunity to kind of be very open about research in a in a very accessible way so to just give you an example, another COVID research project we had or we still have going on this, and we were researching the effectiveness of countermeasures in schools. And we were doing that with a computer simulation where we had an agent based model of children and teachers in schools. We put many different measures like masks preventive testing ventilation, cohorting of the students into the simulation model and look at the outcomes in terms of how infections spread in that school. And obviously, as researchers, when communicating these results we already make many decisions and filter the results to communicate because if we would look at all the possible combinations of measures that thousands of them. We make certain combinations that we as researchers researchers think are important to communicate them to both the policymakers and to our peers. And what we did is that we made an online visualization tool. Exploration tool actually I can link that later in the chat where people can really start configuring their own school, and then they can pick measures, and then they can look at exemplary outbreaks in schools given these measures, and they can see the outcomes of a certain selection of measures in the context of other possible selections. And while I'm obviously that's not really than a scientific outcome is just one example, but still it enables people to like see for themselves, what is possible in the simulation and what different combinations are there. And that we hoped to like make that more accessible and we also hope actually to use it in the kind of pedagogical context in schools, so that the schools, teachers and the children's themselves can can understand like what a measure what the effect of a measure is and how it influences the infection dynamics in the school. It was was a pretty cool project, but as I already said it was only possible because we had this professional whose job it really was to implement that with us. I couldn't have done that on my own. Yeah, and then I if I'm allowed to share that you told us as well that this was a side project of you guys right in the beginning at least. Yeah, that's that's how I remember it that this was not funded the way it could have been funded, and that you did it because you thought it was really necessary to do. So I guess that is also an important fact that we have to consider that a lot of those activities they don't really receive the necessary, not only the attention from funders but also there are no schemes for for activities like this for this kind of translatory activities. And I think what what one of the goals of your project where definitely to not only to give an instrument to people to to get more accommodated with this sort of information and maybe play around with it and see that there are actually options and and there are possibilities for them, but it's also a measure that could in a way raise trust in in those information if many people will not see the science right they will they will not make this translation but at least they will see this information that is out there that can be trusted because they can handle it themselves right and and it would be great if you yeah we could also study that dimension in the next time and kind of in a very nice design study that can show what the effects are then actually for the people that use that kind of interface but speaking of trust when when we prepared this session. If I remember correctly, Nate you wanted to say something on that right. Am I am I right. You wanted to add something there. It depends are we on question to now. That is still a question to know that is still that is already the question to so how do we better communicate those we open research practices to the public. Because there's lots to say about how mistrust happened but we'll try to we'll try to go the positive direction. Yeah, I mean one thing that came to light in. Again the US case is a good example is that local. The trust happens that often more at a local level so it's, you know, maybe some of us are more international and moving around and whatnot but a lot of people are really attached to the place where they live and work and have a doctor and that kind of thing. And so this trust really happens. It may be more likely to trust what their doctor says or even what somebody at the supermarket says than what they see on TV or what the, you know, president or chancellor says, and that would suggest that if there was a way to target those people, people who are kind of, local influencers and if there was a way to find them, but if there would be a way to kind of get to those people and try to communicate about open research practices about what what what it means, you know, how can we understand things like the huge error that the young was talking about in these predictions how can we process that and, and how can we you know rely on the data that's being shown to us. I think that would be an interesting opportunity I'm not aware of any specific targeted attempts to do that. I know that in Germany. They wanted to have all the local doctors become vaccinators. And this created a lot of chaos because many local doctors were really just not equipped to do that. And so, you know, you can see how someone who's in that position would then maybe start to take a different pandemic in general just because they're like, my gosh, I can't be vaccinating all of my patients here in my little local family, you know, practice. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity there, and maybe maybe I'll pass it on for others who want to jump in and come back in with other ideas later to make more of a. Tamara, you want to add something. Yeah, thanks, Nate. I guess your example with the local people and the trust is, is very good and I have one related example from this from our fellow program and my mentee. She had a research project and was asking herself how to communicate research results on dementia and Alzheimer's disease to the people and to the to the families who were affected and she kind of wanted to talk to self help groups at the end she had to take a survey because of COVID she couldn't go to them, but anyway what came out is that people she she expected to that the relatives of those the people or the self help groups that they wanted to have informative websites or something and she wanted to do something with wiki media and those platforms and but what they reported is that they like the the personal environment and the sharing of information in their group and what they wanted was a kind of yeah the research and the researchers would come to them and just talk to them personally so they they. They appreciated this this local on the stress of this group and then didn't want all that they couldn't imagine any to getting any better information information online or via a research communication tool as we established for example. Yeah, I can imagine do you have a do you have a link to this project by your fellow. Yeah, put the link. Yeah, this would be great. Yeah, this would be great. Sylvia, do you like to give an example here too. You need to unmute yourself. It's always the same microphone. Thank you. What I find is the possibility to communicate communicate open educational open science practices and to bring it to a broader audience. I think open educational resources and could be a possibility for promoting these practices. For those who never heard of open educational resources I just give a short introduction they are openly licensed teaching and learning materials for which creator allows everybody to reuse and revise them and also to adapt them to other learning contexts and then all without cost. And yeah if anybody interesting in that format. Please let us know. I'm in the way for my point if you can give me an excellent contribution to sciences by training and open science, but as well to lay people, I think, and there are some courses out there already in the web, which everybody can can access and use. And I think, in addition to these quite complex way out which which are focusing on a scientific audience. It could be developed a format like like short videos flyers or the material for schools, etc, which are tailored to a non scientific audience. I think this, this would be a good idea and a good thought and could bring everything forward, especially to bring scientific literacy literacy to the non scientific audience that would really help that context, I suppose. Yeah, so, so I think we have kind of assembled a lot of different positions here and examples. And now we would like to open the floor to the questions of the audience and comments and maybe also somebody wants to share with with with us all. Some of your experiences of, and maybe also lessons learned in making your research open in times of a pandemic, or in general, how to deal with the uncertainty of research in the making while communicating it to the public. And at the moment I don't see any questions in the Q&A, but maybe some will come. Nate, yes, please. While we're waiting for a question, I would also add the skeptics position, someone should take it. Yes, there are certain aspects of this that I might label insurmountable. And two in particular are, for example, it will one is the media, and there are certain things in the United States again us case I know somewhat well in 1985 we had this FCC fairness doctrine overturned which basically meant that media news news media could say anything they want as a fact and say anything they want as news without providing alternative perspectives so it really kind of introduced the heyday of like what we tend to call fake news today. And this is something that is embedded and very hard to overcome and the other thing is the, like Yana was saying earlier the type of communication may need to be tailored to the type of audience I think that's a really important point. Some audiences may be unreachable. And again in the US case there is definitely a large number of people who are identified as Republican who when the science discussion comes up. They believe that it is propaganda so they see it as propaganda this this isn't a, this isn't a political criticism anything it's just a, it's a hurdle that is really hard to overcome because as soon as that oh, let me tell you about the science behind it. Oh no that's that's some kind of, you know, liberal propaganda. So these are things that I'm certainly open to hearing ideas but I find them to be potentially insurmountable hurdles in this effort. I'm sorry for being the negative skeptic. No, no, I think that's really important that it was also the first example by Sylvia know that the science by press conference doesn't really help exactly, exactly when there are a lot of skeptics out there. So let me just check there is a question now by Steven pinfield, who says the general tone of the discussion has been negative. Can anyone quote positive examples of communication of science in the pandemic, which could perhaps be used as examples for future practice. Well, I have to say, I don't see it that way. I think we have given some nice examples. For example, the visual interface that Jana has provided. We posted a link in there in the chat, but also some of the opportunities that come with open peer review, especially in times of a pandemic. So, but maybe some others want to, to add even more positive examples. I, before this question came I was just intended to even post a link to more skeptics and I do it now. I think there are a lot of scientists that was different issues that are defined by group of scientists that also observed some quite concerning tendencies, especially by big publishing houses and and big high impact journals in the time but let's not go too much into these details now. So does anyone of the panelists want to add a more positive stance as Tamara. A more positive example that is that how I experience it that way that we, we learned so for example, the research as they communicated openly from the covered research and the media learned that they are more than one expert. They could ask so it got more diverse in the public discussions and what I experienced which I, and I think that's a good practice now that media is citing the original research more often. Even in the, in the daily news, so that they have a direct link to, to the research and if it's a prepent or if it's open access, it is even readable by the public immediately and that's, that's great. I think that's a good practice to even yet to that lead to more trust. There, there's also a point brought up by Weronik Irma in the Q&A and I think that is also actually tending to be a positive example. Well, the question is, do the panelists have any experiences with organizations like Cyline in the US, or equivalent organizations worldwide, who are providing context and expert opinions on newly published articles and preprints to support journalists who report on scientific services. I, I, me personally, I don't have experiences but I think that these kind of services exist and that also these kind of services are there to, for example, review a lot of scientific papers published and this is also sort of metascience right published there. These results open access is also a very good movement towards more openness and better communication. But maybe the panelists want to say something here. Do you have any experiences with these kind of translation processes to be more general. Anybody wants to say something here. Journalists experiences with with kind of translating particular information to journalists. Jana. I can comment on that, but sadly not in a positive way so no I do not have experience with something like Cyline I think it would be great to have it in Europe, or I don't know in the German speaking use sphere. Because what I experienced, and I had some contact with journalists but actually my, my boss at the time, Peter, I feel like had way more interactions with journalists that the intention of the journalists focus on a very select number of people. They kept asking those people for completely different things, even if they weren't really the experts. So just to give a personal example I did all this research on schools, and then a journalist contacted me and asked me, like if I could comment on the effectiveness of anti gene tests and their sensitivity I had to say look I'm a computational scientist not a microbiologist or molecular biologist I can't really comment on that. And I did that a couple of times and after that they stopped contacting me at all. But there were other people who who commented, even though the science was way outside their field. And so I think it led to a like very narrow perspective from science there was only a handful of voices maybe 10 scientists in total that were present in the but there could have been so many more. There were two experts on the different sub topics. So I would really welcome if a platform that kind of manages the contributions of scientists and the attention of journalists existed. Because I know how this like narrowing of perspectives arises because it's just easier to access the people you already know and you know that will reply to your email. And journalists have a great deal of pressure they need to work fast and they need to reach people fast. So they kind of go low risk way and go for the people they already know how to work with. So yeah, I would really welcome a bit more diverse perspectives here. Anybody else from the panel who wants to comment on that point. Not immediately. Well, yeah, I don't have any experiences with them as well but maybe that's a good. Some of the lessons learned that we need, even as researchers need to know some of the how the media works all the people work there how they do the daily practice and work to understand what. I worked as a journalist and I can agree you have a time pressure and you need to reach out to people immediately. So that's that's a work and maybe in future we could think of new, for example, digital platforms or kind of tools that facilitate maybe this or this example by the good example that facilitates the communication between both the media and the researchers. But I guess I think that that we need this communication to get to talk and communicate research results and give information to the public. Without being too negative. Sorry for that. I have to say that unfortunately, what we see in the media is the tendency to cut science journalism totally right so in most of the big newspapers in in Europe there is not no space anymore for science journalism. And, and many of the science journalists have long left the field to to kind of move more towards consulting and so on because there is just no money in the system for more detailed and and yeah, special reporting on science for this translation I would say. So now what we have is, we have a lot of, let's call them normal journalists like daily business journalists who have to deal with science as well. And for them it's also hard to do so so I think these, as we said before I mean there they need to be much more funding opportunities for for exactly this translation processes and media science is one, but then of course science to other sectors in society is many others and what what what the problem here could be is that we will be too late right because when people talk about preparedness that is the new term that always comes up when science policy interfaces are debated in in kind of in in relation to because societal challenges also the climate crisis crisis, for example, that one big pillar of this preparedness would be exactly these translation processes that most of the time have no funding at all or happen as a side project as a personal interest of people to do so so I guess that is really a big problem and, and I don't know today I saw many funders here at this conference maybe they should also take this more into account that this is really important in order to for the for the well being of society and for the social impact of research to to fund more of those activities. Are there any other questions from the audience I will have to check in the chat but but I don't know there is at the moment I don't see any, but we we only have 12 minutes left so so maybe we kind of slowly wrap it up. And so, I guess now. Okay, we have been a little bit negative but we have tried also to bring up the positive side of it and the, the opportunities that there are and there are so many opportunities with with open science and to to kind of make not to educate or teach the public but to kind of reach out and engage with the public like science in society and not science to society because science is embedded in society of course. And so I would like to ask the panelists for like one last round of what would be now your priority or where would you like to put a wish. I don't know how you say this in English but where you, what would be your wish for a better communication of science in the making and open science in in the near future. So, I don't know who wants to, who wants to go first. Okay, yes we start and is my wish is that scientific literacy would increase in the public as well so that the communication can be a positive and productive in the future that everybody understands how science works and science can explain itself good to the public. Okay, thanks. Yeah, now you wanted to go before one of you. Yeah, I just wanted to reiterate the point I already made. I think that the professionalization of science communication is really helpful for for this process. So people are there to actually trained and paid for doing this. You can do it and can translate between what scientists say and what the public can understand. And I mean I think, especially in Germany it looks like this is slowly happening and that science communication is becoming like a profession, proper profession and it's become gets the attention probably also the resources to serve. And I can just say from experience that it's really helpful to work with somebody who has learned how to do this, and it's really, it really adds something. And it makes the communication reliable because you might find the odd scientist who has a Mac for doing it and also likes it but this is a very lucky find. You know, you have somebody like that in your institution. So, you said if there are funders around, maybe, yeah, think about allocating some funding to the science communicator. Thank you, Yana. So there are coming some comments now in the Q&A. And maybe I kind of put them in now before I let Nathan Tamara say the last sentence if that is okay. So, there is, there was, ah, it's gone now because somebody answered it. So there was this hint that in Latin America, most like 70% of its research is published or open access, yes, for a very long time. And I guess we are all aware of this. So we always, I mean in my talks and presentations I always use Latin America as a pioneer and good example best practice. But that doesn't necessarily, when everything is open access that doesn't necessarily solve the problem that the knowledge has to be translated, right? So it's a very important first step, sorry, but it's not the solution to for broader public engagement with science, I guess. So that is, that is really important. And I see that Nate, you have answered. And then there is, Sharon, sorry, but in the Netherlands there was some success in changing the thinking about preprints among influential science journalists. Awareness has grown of the aspects of standing and statues of preprints. So yeah, I think this is a really good example, what you can do when you do some targeted campaigns or actions on that. And now I'm losing my voice. So maybe Nate or Tamara, you want to jump in here. Sure, I'll give tomorrow the last word if that's okay. Yeah, I think. Okay, so my, my ideal it comes a little bit from Yana's example and in general about communicating reliability or communicating error, because we also as scientists communication isn't is something we need to all develop. But it's also something that we have our limits, right? We could, as we could spend so much time developing communication strategies that we don't spend enough time on science, for example, so it would be great to have specialists that can pick this up and do it for us. But I think one thing that we could really sort of harp on is when we have these errors, these confidence intervals to always present them and maybe point in the, in the direction of the worst case scenarios, you know the worst case here is in this direction right and say, this doesn't mean it will happen, but it could. It's possible. And it's, you know, it's in, you know, and there's this range and, again, you know we've seen these publications recently like this, this book Noise by Kahneman and colleagues and said that when different people look at the same data they're going to come to a different conclusions. Right. And so we can think of politicians like these people, and when they decide to make policy, you know it was, I don't know was it just luck or whatever that in Germany. For example, the national government didn't really follow this science by press conference direction and said no no no we're, we are not going to like open everything up and Germany at least until October was a was a quite a good example of, of preventing some of this had relative, you know, relative good example. And so I assume that some of this had to do with looking at the sort of worst case scenario projections and thinking, wow, let's just make sure that doesn't happen. Good ideas and I agree to all of them with what you said, maybe to to add on this what what I think then it's important is to to start to train our researchers or maybe not the researchers but maybe go step back and even start in in higher education with our students. For example, to to be open to, I don't know, to report or talk about some some errors or so I just recently I have my students and they're writing their, their thesis right now, and they have a deadline next week and last week there was some student coming up to me and saying oh there's when something wrong with our user study I guess with the recording should we write this down in our in our thesis and I said yes that's that's good practice so just report on how it on the process and how what went wrong and then how it how it went and then it's transparent and then I can. I know what's going on. So, so the training of our future researchers, maybe even with more open practices and in higher education and in our teaching and maybe for example selecting students create teaching or research materials on their own and and communicate this to to practice this. So sharing and this openness on on transparency, I guess that will as well influence and be good to to foster open science practices. Thank you very much for your comments so since we still have a little bit of time, I allow myself to add a comment and look into the chat because there are some points here and in the q amp a now coming. I take first the q amp a. There is a message from Bianca Kramer from uni Utrecht, an idea I found very intriguing was the short online course epidemiology one or one offered at McGill University, especially for science journalists. That is a really good example what I will do is, I will take the link and posted into the chat because I don't think. People can see the q amp a probably. I don't know if you guys can see that. But I think in general, it's, it will be really important to deal with to understand that dealing with scientific knowledge has to be more part of the general digital media literacy, right. And this has to be taught much more in schools. And there are other comments here so Sharon postman says, in my view, it's also important as scientists to interact with social socials of mainstream media and give them constructive feedback yeah it's it's important so sometimes it's not enough to just talk to them and kind of throw your knowledge on them but it's you also have the responsibilities to stay with your knowledge and kind of follow what happens with it right so that is, this is a really good last word actually I think, and I think we should all keep this in mind that we also have the responsibility for the knowledge that we produce, and it would be really cool. If we would also get a little bit more funding on on these dimensions in order to increase the preparedness at these so important interfaces of science and policy, but also science and society, more general. So, yeah, I, I don't know, I think, if there are no more questions. We are pretty much on time. Anybody there are those channels that the remote and the slack so I haven't been there now because I had no time but I will go there soon so we can stay in touch there on on the topics. Thank you for this lively discussion for your comments and questions. And thank you to meet the science. I think it's a brilliant conference. Thank you to Mara for making me aware of this conference because I didn't know of this conference before. And thanks also to Wikimedia for their outstanding five year long program free knowledge bias vision, which was an outstanding experience to be part of for me and I guess also for the others on this panel. And yeah, so I guess we are closing this now and we can say goodbye and hopefully see you soon in another context. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you Katja for your moderation and thanks to all the participants.