Competence Centre welcomes new Hubs to the team

2.7 min readBy Published On: 23.01.2025Categories: news, videoTags:

Five new National & Regional Hubs have joined the European Competence Centre for Science Communication – adding to this growing network.

The Hubs are respected organisations working in science communication located across Europe which will play a vital role in shaping and implementing the work of the Competence Centre, which is seeking to enhance the way science is communicated in Europe and beyond.

Our Hubs are a physical presence for the online Competence Centre – they will help to raise the profile of the Centre in their countries, connect with networks to help disseminate resources as well as organising events, such as training sessions.They will also adapt Competence Centre resources so they are best suited to the needs of those communicating science in their countries. 

The new National & Regional Hubs are:

  • Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Czech Republic
  • Labs of Latvia
  • Office of the Ombudsperson for Academic Ethics and Procedures of the Republic of Lithuania
  • Vetenskap & Allmänhet, Sweden
  • Wissenschaft im Dialog, Germany

These new Hubs are in addition to the 18 existing N&R Hubs distributed across northern and southern Europe and beyond. These existing Hubs include the COALESCE partners as well as other highly-respected organisations working in science communication. 

Joana Magalhães, coordinator of COALESCE, says: “It’s wonderful to be able to add new Hubs to the Competence Centre. These Hubs bring relevant expertise and knowledge of their own scicomm ecosystems, some robust and others still scattered, and represent governmental institutions, industry and academia, demonstrating our commitment to including a wide range of perspectives in the Competence Centre’s work. At the same time we are creating an opportunity for them to connect their local stakeholders with a wider and international community.”

The Competence Centre is a growing marketplace, for quality-assured resources, tools, capacity building and guidance to support the work of anyone communicating science, including practitioners, scientists and journalists. These resources are being informed by research, including research that took place within the European Commission’s Science with and for Society (SwafS-19) programme. The Centre is seeking to address challenges to effective science communication such as misinformation, trust, rapid response in times of crisis and bring about a closer integration between science and society. 

The existing Hubs recently met in Barcelona to discuss priorities and ways of working together. The activities included using the Competence Centre’s Crisis Navigator to explore ways the communication of science during a crisis, such as a pandemic, or climate events, such as the recent DANA in Spain, can be improved to bring about more effective responses. You can find out more about what the Hubs got up to here. 

You can also hear from representatives from some of our Hubs about why they wanted to join the Competence Centre and the key challenges to science communication in their country in our YouTube videos: 

There will be another open period for receiving expressions of interest in becoming a COALESCE National & Regional Hub later in 2025.

 

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