Clemens Blümel

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.

The Trend Survey Research Data Infrastructures 2024 is part of the accompanying research of the Basic Services for the National Research Data Infrastructure (Base4NFDI). The trend survey captures the perception, use and evaluation of established and new data infrastructures and services in the German research landscape. The focus in on the perspective of (potential) users.

Digital tools, software and related infrastructures are central to modern science and research. With regards to open science, open software tools are becoming increasingly important as they promote and support collaboration, reproducibility and access to resources. Researchers are actively contributing to the development of these “Open Research Tools (ORT)” and are thus helping to shape the digital transformation of the science system. This change is also noticeable in Germany, where the area of research software is gaining increasing importance. The aim of the study is...

The Trend Survey Research Data Infrastructures 2024 is part of the accompanying research of the Basic Services for the National Research Data Infrastructure (Base4NFDI). The trend survey captures the perception, use and evaluation of established and new data infrastructures and services in the German research landscape. The focus in on the perspective of (potential) users.

This study investigates whether researchers whose published research record is more thematically broad -covering more, and more semantically distant, topics- are also characterized by specific patterns in their mobility between research organizations and countries and their co-authorship patterns. We study a large sample of productive authors in STEM fields who have been active in Germany. Our results show that specific types of international mobility go together with slightly elevated epistemic breadth. But scientists with larger co-author networks have relatively greater epistemic breadth. [...]

This article deals with expectation dynamics in the field of synthetic biology. The article draws on scholarly review articles as the main material, complemented by expert interviews conducted with scholars from the field. The aim is to explore how expectations change over time and how they are used to justify and move the field. Drawing from conceptual advances of the sociology of expectations, I show how expectations are increasingly linked at different levels (the landscape, sector, and niche level) and how they support and justify the field among different audiences.

The contribution deals with what happens when science opens up and communicates’ and the emerging challenges for future scientific communication.