Student-Led Global Network: Open Science to Public Trust
From Open Science to Public Trust using a border-less, student-led global network to curate and disseminate quality, reliable and accessible sources of science information for global communities in their local flavour to improve public engagement, adaptation and participation in STEM.
From vaccine development to SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence data sharing, the COVID-19 pandemic has truly fostered a global framework to support fundamental scientific research. But unfortunately, it has also highlighted the lack of trust of the public in science at many levels. An apparent lack of “openness” of data in the public domain about efficacy, development process, side-effects etc. of vaccines fuelled vaccine hesitancy even among the educated people.
Such examples make a strong case for Lindau Guidelines of scientific results to be published in an open access mode. But publishing results in open access and data in open repositories would not build public trust in science by themselves. Therefore, globally important science information, published in open access, needs to be communicated to the general public in their local context considering public opinion and trust are functions of their societal, political, and cultural perspectives. Usually, public trust is driven by dialogues, but public dialogues by scientists are also limited by their scale and scope.
This project aims to address this key hurdle by building a global network of STEM students who would drive content curation and its global dissemination for building scientific temperament in public. Communicating open science to society through such student-led global networks will pave way for a truly global public dialogue with regional flavour in a language that communities understand and appreciate. Based on the principles of Lindau- “Educate, Inspire & Connect”, this hub and spoke model-based global student-led network will cater to building public trust in science following Lindau guidelines of (a) Publish Results Open Access, (b) Support Talent Worldwide, (c) Communicate to Society, and (d) Engage in Education.
Image courtesy of Mohanish Borana
Group Leader
Mohanish Borana, Lindau Alumnus 2014
Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, India