Facing the challenges of science communication 2.0: quality, credibility and expertise

What are the key challenges for science communication in the age of digital media? Are they entirely new or rather occurring in a different communicative context of longstanding issues pertaining to the credibility and reliability of information and the role of experts? Mystification for propaganda, also involving scientific content and scientists themselves, has certainly not been introduced with the internet. In a context of ‘crisis of mediators’, the quality of public communication of science is – even more than in the past – highly dependent on the quality of research produced and published in specialised contexts. New research is increasingly pushed in real time into the public domain without being ‘filtered’, as was the case in the past decades, by professional mediators and popularisers. This inevitably connects science communication at large with trends causing major concerns in the world of research policy and academic publishing: e.g. a significant rise in retractions, the emergence of ‘predatory journals’, and lack of and failure in replicating studies. The contemporary communicative landscape clearly places new and greater responsibility on researchers and their institutions, who are increasingly active in communication to the ‘end‐user’ and not always prepared to deal with the dynamics and potential risks of such engagement. More in general, we could see in this landscape relevant challenges for science in society research and opportunities to rethink some of the key concepts in this area.