ScienceView | Science View participates in major Horizon 2020 project NUCLEUS

How should science respond to the needs of the people? How could a socially robust and responsible communication foster a genuine dialogue between, let’s say a university and its stakeholders—whether politicians and entrepreneurs, artists and journalists, or citizens at large? How should scientific institutions deal with their new responsibilities in science communication in the face of the decreasing significance of legacy media and its role as branch within a system of checks and balances?

Questions and challenges like these will be tackled by an international consortium of 24 partners in the course of an EU-funded four-year project, called NUCLEUS, an acronym for a “New Understanding of Communication, Learning and Engagement in Universities and Scientific Institutions”, which is budgeted with 4 million euros. Science View is a NUCLEUS partner.

The project is expected to start in September 2015 and aims to find ways to align the communication structures and processes in science on the one hand with the expectations of policy-makers and civil society in the context of “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) on the other.

NUCLEUS describes the scientific institutions as biological ‘cells’, in which the “Nucleus” represents the governance or the leading entity. In order to survive in a dynamic environment, these ‘Nuclei’ need to be appropriately interlinked with other cells around them, such as media, economy, public engagement, and policy. By investigating the links between these ‘cells’ and the obstacles which may hinder a proper upstream engagement in science, the project is expected to result in a widely-applicable ‘DNA’ for RRI, including 30 ‘test beds’ across Europe and a list of practical guidelines for higher education institutions and science-funding agencies. This ‘DNA’ will then form the basis of a living network to ensure the sustainability of the approach beyond the project timeline as well.

NUCLEUS is expected to contribute to the debate on science policy both on national and European levels, including the future design of Horizon 2020 and the European Research Area.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 664932 and is coordinated by Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Cleves, Germany.

Further information can be found from September onwards under www.nucleus-project.eu.

The NUCLEUS consortium comprises the following partners:

Associations

• Beijing Association for Science and Technology, BAST, China

• European Union of Science Journalists’ Association, EUSJA

• European Science Events Association, EUSEA

Universities

• University of Aberdeen, UK, Scotland

• Bielefeld University, Germany

• Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

• Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

• Dublin City University, Republic of Ireland