Our views and opinions on industry issues.
Stempra members might have seen the recent discussions of a case where an organisation was approached to comment on an embargoed report by a journalist, only to be told that said report couldn’t be shared with them at that point. It turned out that the organisation’s experts never got sight of the report before it
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Following our joint letter to Francis Maude, we have received the following response: Dear Ms Fox, Thank you for your email of 27 March expressing your concerns about the recent change to the Civil Service Code requiring civil servants to obtain Ministerial authorisation for contact with the media. First of all I would like to
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Dear Mr Francis Maude, We write to express our deep concern about the recently announced revision of the Civil Service Code that requires all civil servants to seek ministerial authorisation for any contact with the media. We fear that this change will prevent scientists who are employed at public expense from responding to the needs
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By Jess Devonport In October, Petroc Sumner from the InSciOut group at Cardiff University joined Stempra to discuss their research on where hype in science and health news comes from. At that point the study was yet to be published and we were unable to disclose the findings in our event report, we were told
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by Ed Sykes, Chair of Stempra and Head of Mental Health & Neuroscience at Science Media Centre. Journalism-bashing is a popular sport, there’s a whole army of websites set up to mock the media’s worst excesses and in many ways such websites are common because it’s so true. Yet whilst journalism is recognised as having
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EU research got an early Christmas present with the official launch of Horizon 2020 at the end of 2013. Horizon 2020 is the next EU research and innovation framework programme worth some €80 billion over the next seven year. And the calls for the first phase of the programme are already out. So there is
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Our newsroom is the company’s main point of contact for media. Supporting them in their work to bring science to the public, we inform science writers on the latest research papers published in Elsevier journals through press releases, newsletters, free access to ScienceDirect and through linking them with discipline specific publishing experts and journal editors
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At the recent Stempra-BIS science press officer training day, Jen Middleton, Senior Media Officer at the Wellcome Trust, gave us her top 10 tips for science press officers. 1. Don’t sensationalise It’s really important that you are clear about what the research shows but also what its limitations are. If the work was done
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Ather Mirza, Director of the University of Leicester News Centre, spearheaded the seven month media planning that culminated in global media attention on the discovery of King Richard III’s skeleton under a car park. The discovery of King Richard III by a team from the University of Leicester made global front page news. The press
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