Celebrating the wonders of science: European Researchers’ Night invites everyone to get involved!

This weekend, European Researchers’ Night is being celebrated across Sweden with events in 30 cities. Schools and the public across the country are invited to meet researchers in a dazzling variety of fun and interactive activities ranging from spectacular physics shows to hands-on experiments and space games. Coordinated nationally by VA, ForskarFredag is Sweden’s most widespread science festival. In addition, this year’s citizen science project – the Star-Spotting Experiment, investigating the growing problem of light pollution – is joining forces with a number of international partners to collect data in Ireland, Spain, and the UK too.

New study on Swedish researchers’ views on communication and open science

Sweden's researchers want to communicate more with the outside world. But they are hindered by both internal and external obstacles, including a lack of time, a lack of dedicated resources and difficulties finding suitable opportunities and target audiences to communicate with. These are some of the results of a nationwide survey of 3,700 researchers at Swedish universities and university colleges.

Forthcoming activities

On 9 October, VA is running two parallel workshops in Stockholm: Open Science – What’s in it for me? will look at open science concepts and tools that have the potential to transform the current scientific system. The workshop on Science Shops will explore opportunities and different models for setting up Science Shops. The events support work being undertaken as part of the EU SciShops and ORION Open Science projects. Both workshops will be held in Swedish and registration is still open.

As the 2019 Researchers’ Grand Prix gets underway to find Sweden’s best science communicator, researchers are being invited to compete in the N.Ö.R.D (National Open Nationwide Contest) to directly win a place in the final on 26 November in Stockholm. To enter, researchers must record an engaging four-minute presentation about their research. Films can be made in either English or Swedish. The deadline for applications is 20 October.

The Star-Spotting Experiment, this year’s Swedish Researchers’ Night citizen science project, is a finalist in the 2019 Falling Walls Engage competition. Lena Söderström will be attending the international Falling Walls conference on 8-9 November in Berlin on behalf of VA to present the project. Fingers crossed!

A new Open Science online MOOC course to help researchers to share their science with the world is being launched by the EU ORION Open Science project. Easily digestible modules will explore different aspects of Open Science and allow researchers to gain a certificate in Open Science. The MOOC will start on 21 October. 

If you are interested in Science Shops and community-based participatory research, save the date for SciShops’ final symposium being held 30-31 January 2020 in Brescia, Italy. The programme will include skills development workshops and SciShops will be showcasing its ten new Science Shops.

VA’s recent activities

VA ran its first pop-up Science Shop on 1 July during Almedalen Week in Visby, Sweden. Throughout the day, researchers from Swedish research organisations encouraged visitors to stop by the pop-up Science Shop to discover how research can be used to inform solutions to societal issues and to identify questions that they’d like to be answered by research.

VA has been busy over the last few months promoting Science Shops to international audiences. On 10 September, VA ran a workshop on Science Shops at the International Transdisciplinary Conference in Gothenburg. Project Manager Helen Garrison also presented a number of inspiring science shop models in a webinar on 20 September organised by the EU InSPIRES project. VA’s Maria Hagardt contributed to sessions at the SciShops summer school held in Cyprus in July.

VA has signed an open letter to the European Commissioner for Research and Innovation, Carlos Mœdas. The letter calls for an inversion of the “top-down” dissemination of scientific results in favour of involving citizens in the co-creation and co-design of the next EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. 

The concept of bioeconomy and its potential in tackling global sustainability challenges are still rather unfamiliar to many within the EU. In a blog post, first published on bioekonomi.fi, VA explains how the EU BLOOM project is seeking to raise awareness of the importance of the bioeconomy and highlights some of the recent activities the Nordic BLOOM Hub has been undertaking to engage the public in these issues.

Open science at any cost? was the topic of a dialogue seminar organised on 2 July at Almedalen Week in Sweden. With contributions from panellists including the Vice-Chancellor of Malmö University, members of the Swedish Parliament and the European Commission, discussion focused on ways to make research more accessible to society and some of the obstacles to achieving open science at both a national and European level.

VA’s recent publications and resources available in English

VA Barometer 2018/2019: An annual survey into the Swedish public’s general attitudes towards science and researchers.

VA information folder 2019: Information about VA and its members.

What is science? An animated YouTube clip from VA, aiming to foster understanding of how scientific progress is made.

Researchers’ views on communication and open science in Sweden
– a summary

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