This appeared from our Comms Director, Meagan Phelan, over on the Science Editor’s Blog. Sign up below if interested.
It’s a new year, and we’ve got a new offering at the Science family of journals—an effort focused on reaching the journalists whose output, data show, is the dominant source of news among policy-makers.
The Science Press Package (“SciPak”) team has long delivered embargoed content from the Science family journals to reporters at news outlets around the world. Starting this week, we will add a “Policy Pak”* aimed at creators of newsletters, which are increasingly relied on by policy-makers to keep abreast of important issues.
To anticipate their needs, we conducted one-on-one interviews with editors and writers at top newsletter-producing publications such as Axios, Politico, and the Washington Post, whose daily missives are reaching policy-makers at the local, state, and national levels. We learned that although these outlets are interested in topics informed by scientific data and dialogue, they’ve not been receiving updates from scientific journals.
We also talked to colleagues from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, publisher of the Science journals) who are involved in science policy work, meeting with leaders of the AAAS local Science Engagement Network and the AAAS Office of Government Relations. This deepened our grasp of science policy–related areas of routine interest at the local to federal level in the United States.
Like our other embargoed press packages, Policy Pak will include 250-word lay language summaries of research papers that clearly articulate how those studies advance their fields. But Policy Pak is different in that it will represent content from all six of our journals in a single weekly update to the press, and it will include only entries that are policy relevant. Through our team’s curation, this weekly press package will highlight our latest coverage on topics including immigration and the flow of talent in science, climate insurance, data privacy, green infrastructure, the status of pollinator wildlife, vehicle electrification, benchmarking of artificial intelligence, climate change’s impact on health disparities, and many more.
We are starting by sending Policy Pak to a small cohort of newsletter producers, mostly in the United States and Europe, and we plan routine check-ins to ensure that the content we’re providing is of value to them. We then aim to expand our offering globally.
A special aim of Policy Pak is to address the growing focus on research integrity. When an error in the scientific record is found, how did it get there? How fast will it be corrected, and by whom? What is learned in the process? We plan to be in contact with authors about progress they’ve seen in their fields with respect to research integrity—and about progress they’d like to see. We will share key insights in authors’ own words. Ideally, this and other efforts for Policy Pak will lead to more scientists being interviewed by outlets that SciPak doesn't normally reach—and hopefully by policy-makers themselves.
It is our hope that Policy Pak will be a valuable new resource, inspiring new ideas for coverage or adding evidence-based insight to topics that newsletters have already been monitoring. Sometimes the evidence will add support. Other times, it will raise new questions.
Public policy is always more complex than it seems, involving a wide range of inputs. With the help of newsletter publishers, we envision Policy Pak as one small but substantial new contribution.
Meagan Phelan is Communications Director for the Science Family of Journals, Washington, DC, USA. mphelan@aaas.org
*If you are a reporter interested in signing up for access to the embargoed Policy Pak, please reach out to us at policypak@aaas.org.