Publications

Hostility towards science has emerged as a significant challenge in contemporary science communication, particularly in increasingly politicised and digitally mediated public environments. Scholars across diverse disciplines are confronted with harassment, delegitimisation, political interference, disinformation, and personal attacks, especially when engaging in public communication. This editorial introduces the JCOM commentary set “Scholars Under Attack” and situates hostility towards science within broader transformations of media ecosystems, political polarisation, and contested epistemic authority.

In this commentary, we examine patterns of attacks against scholars focusing on the case of Germany. Drawing on the responses to open and closed questions in a recent survey of 2,600 German researchers, we identify context- and field-specific patterns of science hostility. While most responding researchers do not experience severe attacks, those engaged in specific fields may be at a higher risk of being threatened. We argue that attacks on researchers may not be perceived as acts of hostility against scientific institutions but rather emerge in the context of controversial topics.

Nacaps, the National Academics Panel Study, is a longitudinal study of doctoral candidates and doctorate holders in Germany funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) until 2024. The project aims at providing nationwide cross-sectional and longitudinal data on doctoral candidates and doctorate holders in Germany regarding their study conditions as well as their career trajectories within and outside of academia. The Nacaps study series apply a panel design to multiple cohorts. [...] Full Abstract: https://doi.org/10.21249/DZHW:nac2020:1.0.0

This study investigates the diversity of national scholarly journal publishing ecosystems in seven countries across Europe and Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Mexico, Poland, and Türkiye. It challenges the common perception that global scholarly publishing is dominated by international commercial publishers by examining national publishing structures beyond English speaking contexts.

Global scholarly information systems provide poor coverage for social science and humanities research taking place outside of the anglophone world and in languages other than English. Paul Donner, Stephan Stahschmidt, Serhii Nazarovets, Igor Cojocaru, Irina Cojocaru, Marina Razmadze and Shushanik Sargsyan highlight a range of national initiatives taking place aimed at improving scholarly data for local and national research and argue for the value of their greater integration.