Communicating research from the inside: the OnFoods community blog

The blog was not conceived as a simple channel for "dissemination", but as a cultural and training programme, in which the people doing research can learn to tell the story of their own work clearly, engagingly and rigorously. Not a shop window, then, but rather a training ground: a space in which to practise, to compare notes, to learn and also to expose oneself.

The programme developed through a cycle of seminars, workshops and individual mentoring, during which we worked together on defining a shared editorial plan, on writing the articles and on building a narrative voice that is clear, readable and reliable. The result is a collection of contributions that tell the themes and challenges of OnFoods from the inside, through the eyes of the people doing research every day: in laboratories, in lecture rooms, in the field.

The Research Community Blog is therefore at once a platform, a laboratory and a collective exercise. It is a small but concrete answer to the need to build new ways of communicating science, starting from the awareness that today the quality of research is measured also by its capacity to tell its own story to the world.

In building this project we came up against a by now mature shift: the progressive and certainly not new medialisation of science, that is, the growing integration of media logics into research practice. The way science communicates (and communicates itself) is no longer an accessory activity, but a structural dimension of doing research, tied not only to the so-called "third mission" of universities but to a more general transformation of the relationship between the production of knowledge and public space.

Researchers are now increasingly called on to become narrators of their own work: to explain, to take a position, to "account for" what they do. And this happens in an information ecosystem in which traditional media have lost their centrality, while direct channels (blogs, social networks, newsletters) and individual responsibility in producing content grow in importance.

The disintermediation of science communication has undoubtedly opened new possibilities: it allows researchers to speak directly, to shape the account of their own work themselves, to assert greater control over the content and over its form. But this autonomy comes with a series of structural fragilities that deserve attention. The absence of journalistic or editorial mediation can generate a sense of communicative solitude, in which the lack of external exchange reduces the possibility of building dialogic and genuinely public narratives. To this is added the risk of self-referentiality, or worse of an instrumental use of communication as a reputational lever within the evaluative logics of contemporary academia.

In a context marked by growing pressure on scientific productivity, widespread precarity and multidimensional workloads, the demand also to be an effective communicator can turn into a further source of stress, contributing to an expansion of individual responsibility that almost never finds a counterpart in recognition or resources. Disintermediation, understood this way, risks becoming an implicit delegation on the part of institutions, which offload onto individual researchers the task of holding public space, without offering adequate tools or building stable alliances with the people who have made communication their profession.

More deeply, a question arises that many consider crucial: whose task is it to tell the story of science? If researchers also become communicators, what happens to the role of the science press, of specialist journalists, of editorial teams? Do we not risk, in the name of efficiency and communicative autonomy, replacing rather than integrating?

Moreover, the growing tendency of academic institutions to equip themselves with internal channels and staff to manage communication (a tendency that falls within what some call, with a certain ambivalence, the "entrepreneurial academy") raises a couple of questions. If on one hand it allows greater coherence and control over the public image, on the other it can turn science communication into an exercise in branding, more attentive to reputation than to the quality of the debate. And here lies much of the responsibility a communicator may or may not exercise in their work.

The idea we have formed over these months of working with the people who do research is that facing these tensions calls for a good friendship between research and communication, one based neither on blind delegation nor on self-sufficiency. The model tried with the OnFoods Research Community Blog aims in that direction: the content is written by researchers, but accompanied by an editorial process involving communication consultants, journalists and expert reviewers.

It is not a matter of "tidying up the words", but of building a chain of science communication that recognises the specificity of the different roles: the person doing research brings the knowledge, the person doing communication helps make it public effectively, the person leading the project guarantees coherence and openness.

Our experience shows that this friendship is possible. It is not easy, it takes time, trust and resources. But when it works the results are plain: not only more readable articles, but more aware researchers, more transparent projects, more credible institutions.

It is precisely in the writing that a fault line opened during the work on the blog: the difference, not so much of value as of function, between narrative and academic writing. Two different ways of putting the world in order.

On one side, "paper" writing, governed by formal norms, structural constraints and precise citation, whose aim is the reasoned demonstration of a result within a scientific community. It is a highly codified form of language, built to be verifiable, reproducible, integrable into a field of knowledge. It is thought that anchors itself, that makes itself explicit according to known rules, that develops in logical blocks.

On the other side, storytelling, when conducted with intellectual honesty and rigour, is not an embellishment but an exercise in a different order. It does not argue in sections, it builds meaning through relations: between events, people, contexts, transformations. It sets things in sequence not to demonstrate but to bring out connections, questions, possible meanings. It is a language that seeks connection, not closure.

In the blog this distinction became practice: every time a researcher tried to "turn" a paper into a piece for a general audience, the shift was not so much a simplification as a transfiguration of purpose. It was not a matter of repeating in simpler form what had already been said, but of imagining another form for saying something similar, to a different audience, with different ends. Not to convince, but to involve. Not to detail, but to orient.

In this sense, writing for the blog will, I hope, have worked as a cognitive exercise: a way of rethinking one's own knowledge and reordering it not according to the internal logic of the discipline, but according to the external logic of relevance. Why does this matter? To whom? How can you explain why it is important, without losing what makes it reliable?

These questions certainly do not replace those of research, but they sit alongside them. And anyone who writes knows it: every form has its purpose. Scientific writing organises knowledge in order to produce shared truths. Storytelling, used consciously, organises knowledge in order to make it legible, situated, close at hand.

The OnFoods Research Community Blog was, for many of the participants, a first occasion to try themselves against new languages. Some of them had never written; others already had experience, but found new perspectives in the exchange with colleagues and with our group. All of them, however, approached the passage from academic communication to public narrative as a practice to be learned. And this laboratory dimension is perhaps the most significant aspect of the project: the blog does not limit itself to showing the content of the research, it also shows, between the lines, how one can learn to tell it. It does not offer a ready-made model, then, but represents an open process, repeatable and adaptable to other contexts.

In doing so, it perhaps also answers one of the most insidious ambiguities of the so-called entrepreneurial academy — the one described by scholars such as Sheila Slaughter, Gary Rhoades and Burton Clark — which pushes universities to compete on the ground of communication without always offering the structural conditions for doing so ethically, critically and in a participatory way. In a landscape marked by quantitative assessment, impact metrics and reputational logics, communication risks becoming a promotional weapon. And so an effective antidote may be to return to practice: to train people in communication as we train them in research, recognising its dignity, its competences and its timescales.