Tag: scicomm

Advancing carbon cycle understanding: Pensoft joins the CONCERTO project

Combining expertise in project branding and stakeholder engagement, Pensoft will support the collaborative mission to enhance understanding and modelling of the terrestrial carbon cycle

Pensoft takes on a fundamental part in the newly launched EU-funded project: Improved CarbOn cycle represeNtation through multi-sCale models and Earth obseRvation for Terrestrial ecOsystems (CONCERTO) as a leader of Work Package 7: Communication, dissemination and synergies of project results and sustainability.

Officially started on 1st January 2025, the kick-off meeting for CONCERTO was held in Milan, Italy, on 21-22 January 2025. Over 35 participants attended the meeting in person, while several other colleagues joined online to shape the vision of CONCERTO’s aim to strengthen the European research ecosystem by creating an innovative scientific collaborative framework that enhances our understanding, monitoring, and modelling of the terrestrial cycle, and leads to reduced uncertainty and Earth system models convergence.

CONCERTO project’s kick-off meeting was held on 21-22 January 2025 in Milan, Italy. The meeting also welcomed project members remotely.
The Project

The key objectives of the CONCERTO project are:

To enhance the understanding, monitoring, and modelling of the terrestrial carbon cycle, while reducing uncertainty, and enabling Earth System Model convergence.

To utilise novel Earth Observation data to advance research and improve the representation of land cover, leaf area index, and management intensity through high-resolution maps.

To integrate advanced Data Assimilation and Machine Learning into modelling to deliver more accurate and reliable insights.

To prepare for the incorporation of FLEX data into land surface models and leverage data to improve understanding of biogenic volatile organic compound emissions.

Pensoft’s role in CONCERTO

As the leader of Work Package 7, Pensoft will focus on disseminating the science behind the project by ensuring effective communication and engagement strategies. A distinctive brand identity will be established through the creation of a project logo, branding guidelines, promotional materials, and a dedicated website. This website will act as a central hub for project content and updates, providing stakeholders and the public with easy access to relevant information.

To maximize the project’s impact, Pensoft will develop a comprehensive communication and dissemination strategy to share project results with key stakeholders and target audiences. Additionally, stakeholder engagement efforts will produce high-quality content such as videos, press releases, and newsletters. These materials will communicate the project’s progress and results, reaching a wide audience and fostering greater understanding and awareness of the project’s scientific objectives.

International Consortium

The project brings together thirteen international partners from seven countries operating in various sectors, ultimately contributing with diverse expertise:

  1. FONDAZIONE CENTRO EURO-MEDITERRANEOSUI CAMBIAMENTI CLIMATICI, Italy
  2. METEOROLOGICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL EARTH OBSERVATION SRL, Italy
  3. SISTEMA GMBH, Austria
  4. EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR MEDIUM-RANGE WEATHER FORECASTS, United Kingdom
  5. BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER CENTRO NACIONAL DE SUPERCOMPUTACION, Spain
  6. UNIVERSITEIT ANTWERPEN, Belgium
  7. CENTRO DE INVESTIGACION ECOLOGICA Y APLICACIONES FORESTALES, Spain
  8. UNIVERSITEIT TWENTE, Netherlands
  9. INSTITUT ROYAL D’AERONOMIE SPATIALEDE BELGIQUE, Belgium
  10. POLITECNICO DI TORINO, Italy
  11. PENSOFT PUBLISHERS, Bulgaria
  12. THE UNIVERSITY OF READING, United Kingdom
  13. IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE, United Kingdom.

Over the coming months, the CONCERTO project will focus on creating innovative resources to support professionals in improving multi-scale models and Earth observation for terrestrial ecosystems.

The CONCERTO project website is coming soon!

In the meantime, make sure to follow the project’s progress by following our social media channels on BlueSky and LinkedIn.

Clear, Open and Engaged: Pensoft’s perspective on the mission of a science communicator

Teodor Metodiev, senior communications officer at Pensoft, offers his thoughts on why and how research should be publicised today.

Teodor Metodiev, senior communications officer at Pensoft at the opening of “The pollinators we can’t live without” temporary exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia, Bulgaria, 2023).

With more than three decades of experience in the domain of science communication, Pensoft has a rich perspective on what it takes to bring science into the spotlight. A testament to this is its growing projects department, where the public face of some of Europe’s most innovative research undertakings is being moulded by a cohort of experts. 

Among their ranks is Teodor Metodiev, a communicator with years of experience when it comes to bridging the gap between the scientific and the public. He recently sat down for an interview to share his observations on the significance, challenges and lessons of the job. 

Read below to find out how effective engagement can make today’s research tomorrow’s reality.  

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Why is science communication important and how can it influence the scope and impact of today’s research?

I believe science communication is fundamental because it eliminates the gap between researchers and users of their work, be they policymakers, practitioners or other stakeholders. By combining novel and traditional communication methods, scientific knowledge, results and data are much more likely to be shared, understood, and applied. If not communicated effectively, scientific results and advances have no real impact and are simply lost in an avalanche of emerging new information.

What are the most common challenges you encounter as a science communicator?

There are many diverse challenges one could encounter as a science communicator! I believe the most common one is the overall complexity of science, which is sometimes very difficult to communicate in a clear, visually appealing way. For me personally, one of the greater challenges is to delve into controversial topics such as climate change, vaccines, or genetic engineering, where emotions and ideologies may run high.

How can complex technical concepts be made accessible to non-science stakeholders and the general public?

Making complex concepts accessible to the general public is among the main responsibilities of a science communicator. There are many different approaches to do that, but it ultimately depends on the audience you want to engage – for example, you would not necessarily want to interact with a farmer through policy briefs. In general, I would list three main ‘pillars’ that can be considered when dealing with complex scientific information:

  • Simplify the language and avoid scientific jargon (i.e. by using short sentences with a clear structure)
  • Always leverage visual aids, such as infographics, animations, videos or graphical abstracts
  • Try to present the information in a narrative-like form – start with the background and problem, and then explain the solutions you are offering.

By adhering to these simple steps, I believe most challenging scientific concepts can be easily translated into an understandable format for laypersons or other stakeholder groups!

Which indicators do you consider crucial when assessing the success of a science communication campaign?

In my view, the success of any science communication campaign should be measured beyond quantitative indicators. Sure, audience reach, number of impressions and demographic data are important, but real success should be assessed through active engagement (i.e. comments or questions towards the topic, participation in events or activities, feedback and criticism from evaluation surveys, etc). I believe that monitoring these qualitative indicators on an ongoing basis is instrumental for a long-term awareness and understanding of a given topic over time.

What has made Pensoft unique and effective in the field of science communication?

I honestly believe the driving force behind Pensoft’s success in science communication is the motivated team behind it –  it has demonstrated that an openness to engage, combined with an urge to learn and expand your horizons, is ultimately the making of a successful science communicator. In addition to being curious and forthcoming, an environmental conscience is another fundamental characteristic of Pensoft which surely resonates with all of its members!

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Explore past and present research projects in Pensoft’s communication portfolio.  

Pensoft at the 7th European Congress of Conservation Biology as a publisher and Horizon project partner

At the Pensoft’s stand, delegates learned about the scientific publisher’s versatile open-access journal portfolio, as well as related publishing services and the Horizon project where Pensoft is a partner.

Between 17th and 22nd June 2024, Pensoft’s scholarly publishing and project teams joined the European Congress of Conservation Biology (ECCB), organised by the Society for Conservation Biology and hosted by the University of Bologna.

Here’s a fun fact: the University of Bologna is the oldest one still in operation in the world. It is also etched in history for being the first institution to award degrees of higher learning.  

This year, the annual event themed “Biodiversity positive by 2030” took place in the stunning Italian city of Bologna famous for its historical and cultural heritage, in a way building a bridge between the past of European civilisation and the future, which is now in our hands.

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At the Pensoft’s stand, delegates learned about the scientific publisher’s versatile open-access journal portfolio of over 30 journals covering the fields of ecology and biodiversity, as well as other related services and products offered by Pensoft, including the end-to-end full-featured scholarly publishing platform ARPHA, which hosts and powers all Pensoft journals, in addition to dozens other academic outlets owned by learned societies, natural history museums and other academic institutions.

In addition to its convenient collaborative online environment, user interface and automated export/import workflows, what ARPHA’s clients enjoy perhaps the most, are the various human-provided services that come with the platform, including graphic and web design, assistance in journal indexing, typesetting, copyediting and science communication.

Visitors at the stand could also be heard chatting with Pensoft’s Head of Journal development, Marketing and PR: Iva Boyadzhieva about the publisher’s innovative solutions for permanent preservation and far-reaching dissemination and communication of academic outputs that do not match the traditional research article format.

For example, the Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO) journal was launched in 2015 by Pensoft as an open-science journal that would publish ‘unconventional’ research outputs, such as Grant proposals, Policy briefs, Project reports, Data management plans, Research ideas etc. Its project-branded open-science collections are in fact one of the Pensoft’s products that enjoys particular attention to participants in scientific projects funded by the likes of the European Commission’s Horizon programme.

Another innovation by Pensoft that easily becomes a talking point at forums like ECCB, is the ARPHA Conference Abstract (ACA) platform, which is basically a journal for conference abstracts, where abstracts are treated and published much like regular journal articles (a.k.a. ‘mini papers’) to enable permanent preservation, but also accessibility, discoverability and citability. Furthermore, ACA has been designed to act as an abstracts submission portal, where the abstracts undergo review and receive feedback before being published and indexed at dozens of relevant scientific databases.

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At ECCB 2024, our team was also happy to meet in person many authors and editors, whose work has frequented the pages of journals like Nature Conservation, Biodiversity Data Journal, ZooKeys and NeoBiota, to name a few.

On Wednesday, delegates also got a chance to hear the talk by renowned vegetation ecologist at the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences and Editor-in-Chief at the Vegetation Classification and Survey journal: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Dengler. He presented findings and conclusions concerning neophytes in Switzerland, while drawing comparisons with other European countries and regions.

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At this year’s ECCB, Pensoft took a stand as an active Horizon project participant too. At the publisher’s booth, the delegates could explore various project outputs produced within REST-COAST, SpongeBoost and BioAgora. Each of these initiatives has been selected by the European Commission to work on the mitigation of biodiversity decline, while aiming for sustainable ecosystems throughout the Old continent.

In all three projects, Pensoft is a consortium member, who contributes with expertise in science communication, dissemination, stakeholder engagement and technological development.

Coordinated by the Catalonia University of Technology UPC-BarcelonaTech and involving over 30 European institutions, REST-COAST has been working on developing tools to address key challenges to coastal ecosystems – all consequences of a long history of environmental degradation of our rivers and coasts.

Having started earlier this year, SpongeBoost is to build upon existing solutions and their large-scale implementation by implementing innovative approaches to improve the functional capacity of sponge landscapes. The project is coordinated by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and will be developed with the active participation of 10 partnering institutions from seven countries across Europe. 

In the meantime, since 2022, the five-year BioAgora project has been working towards setting up the Science Service for Biodiversity platform, which will turn into an efficient forum for dialogue between scientists, policy actors and other knowledge holders. BioAgora is a joint initiative, which brings together 22 partners from 13 European countries led by the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE).

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Still, REST-COAST, SpongeBoost and BioAgora were not the only Horizon projects involving Pensoft that made an appearance at ECCB this year thanks to the Pensoft team. 

On behalf of OBSGESSION – another Horizon-funded project, Nikola Ganchev, Communications officer at Pensoft, presented a poster about the recently started project. Until the end of 2027, the OBSGESSION project, also led by the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) and involving a total of 12 partnering organisations, will be tasked with the integration of different biodiversity data sources, including Earth Observation, in-situ research, and ecological models. Eventually, these will all be made into a comprehensive product for biodiversity management in both terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. 

On Tuesday evening, the CO-OP4CBD (abbreviation for Co-operation for the Convention on Biological Diversity) team: another Horizon Europe project, where Pensoft contributes with expertise in science communication and dissemination, held a workshop dedicated to what needs to be done to promote CBD activities in Central and Eastern Europe.

On the next day, scientists from the EuropaBON consortium: another project involving Pensoft that had concluded only about a month ago, held a session to report on the final conclusions from the project concerning the state and progress in biodiversity monitoring.

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You can find the detailed scientific programme of this year’s ECCB on the congress’ website. 

Use the #ECCB2024 hashtag on X (formerly Twitter) to relive highlights from the ECCB congress. 

All articles published in Pensoft journals at your fingertips with the Researcher app

Following a recent integration with the novel, social network-style research discovery app Researcher, the scholarly platform ARPHA has taken yet another step to ensure scholarly publications from across its open-access, peer-reviewed journal portfolio are as easy to find and read as possible. Now, research papers published in all Pensoft’s and all other journals hosted on ARPHA Platform can reach the 1.8 million current users of Researcher directly on their smartphones.

Following a recent integration with the novel, social network-style research discovery app Researcher, the scholarly publishing platform ARPHA has taken yet another step to ensure scholarly publications from across its open-access, peer-reviewed journal portfolio are as easy to find and read as possible. Now, research papers published in all Pensoft’s, as well as all other journals hosted on ARPHA, can reach the 1.8 million current users of Researcher directly on their screens.

Similarly to the world’s best known and used social media networks: Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, Researcher allows its users, scientists and academics, to follow their favourite scholarly journals and topics, in order to receive their content in a personalised newsfeed format, either on their phones or computers. Thus, they can stay up to date with the latest research in their scientific fields by simply scrolling down: much like what they are already used to in their everyday life outside academia. 

Similarly to the well-known social network apps, Researcher lets users bookmark papers to go back to later on and even invite friends to join the platform. Furthermore, the users can also synchronise their accounts with their ORCID iDs, in order to load their own papers on their profiles on Researcher. 

The Researcher app fetches new publications from all indexed journals several times a day, thus ensuring that a user’s newsfeed is updated in almost real time. Now, the ARPHA-hosted journals have joined the 17,000 academic outlets from across the sciences already sharing their publications on the app.

“At Pensoft, we are perfectly aware that good and open science practices go far beyond cost-free access to research articles. In reality, Open Science is also about easier findability and reusability, that is the probability one stumbles across a particular research publication, and consequently, cite and build on the findings in his/her own studies. By indexing our journals with Researcher, we’re further facilitating the discoverability of their content to the benefit of the authors who trust us with their work,”

says ARPHA’s and Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof. Lyubomir Penev.

“We share ARPHA’s belief that Open Science means more than just free access – it means giving scholarly and scientific content the best chance to get in front the right reader at the right time. Our mission is to make sure that scientists and researchers never miss vital research. This partnership will ensure that distribution to our users across the world is built into the ARPHA platform – boosting discoverability and smoothing the path to impact,”

adds Olly Cooper, CEO of Researcher.

Follow ARPHA on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Publishing platform ARPHA partners with Altmetric to track online attention to research

With a research output mentioned online every 1.8 seconds, it only makes sense for the science community to grow curious of how they could access the knowledge of this public interest to better and build on their work.

Journal publishing platform ARPHA, developed by academic publisher Pensoft, has partnered with Altmetric to enable authors, readers and other users to track the online shares and discussions relating to each research output in journals published on ARPHA.

Thanks to the integration, a single click in the top menu of an article reveals the Altmetric donut visualisation, which provides an at-a-glance summary of the attention the item has received. The colours of the donut reflect the source of the attention, and the user can click on the image to be taken to the Altmetric details page, which provides a record of all of the mentions. Data is updated in real-time to provide insight into how the item is being received and shared.

To deliver such detailed information, Altmetric follows 2,000 mainstream media outlets in over 30 languages, social networks, public policy documents, post-publication peer-review forums, online reference managers, blogs, and Wikipedia.

As a result, all authors, readers, editors and funders can easily and immediately track the popularity, reception and impact of each of their studies.

“Having built an extensive portfolio of innovations as a technological provider, we are always looking forward to making yet another effort at providing our users with the best-quality experience. The integration of Altmetric data provides us with another opportunity to do exactly this,” says Pensoft’s founder and CEO Prof Lyubomir Penev.

“Furthermore, the science community has long been in need of a more adequate measure of the influence and engagement of individual research outputs, and Altmetric provides this.”

Altmetric’s Founder Euan Adie adds, “We’re excited to see the Altmetric badges being implemented across the ARPHA platform. Helping researchers get credit for their work and demonstrate its reach and influence is a core part of what we do, and this integration provides new opportunities to do so.”

The Altmetric badges and associated details pages are now available for all articles within Pensoft’s journals, as well as the journals using the white-label publishing available from ARPHA.

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Additional information:

About Altmetric:

Altmetric was founded in 2011 and has made it a mission to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly literature. Altmetric tracks what people are saying about research outputs online and works with some of the biggest publishers, funders, and institutions around the world to deliver this data in an accessible and reliable format. Altmetric is supported by Digital Science. Visit https://www.altmetric.com for more information, and follow on Twitter @altmetric.

About ARPHA:

ARPHA is the first end-to-end journal publishing solution that supports the full life cycle of a manuscript, from authoring through submission, peer review, publication and dissemination. With ARPHA, journals and publishers enjoy a complete set of services, which enable tailored, technologically advanced publishing solutions. The platform enables a variety of publishing models through a number of options for branding, production and revenue models to choose from.