Interested? Or curious to hear more? Send me an email at a.l.fleerackers [at] uva [dot] nl

(And please share, share, share 💚🙏💚)

If you take part, we'd invite you to answer some questions about your experiences as a journalist who covers climate in an interview taking 30-60 min.

We can offer you a 25 euro gift card in thanks for your time.

The project examines journalists' experiences reporting climate stories and their perceptions of “solutions journalism.” But even climate journalists who have never used, or even heard of, solutions journalism are welcome to participate

Story by the wonderful @naseemmiller.bsky.social , research by the wonderful @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca and @lauramoorhead.bsky.social

I would love to see more research on this topic!

Read the whole study, co-authored by the wonderful @lauramoorhead.bsky.social and @juancommander.scholcommlab.ca here:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Curious to hear your thoughts!

#scicomm #journalism #openscience

The findings are also problematic from a diversity perspective, as they suggest research from smaller, lesser-known, OA journals, and published by researchers whose first language is not English, may remain hidden from public view.

The findings are concerning, because some of these strategies are unlikely to help journalists weed out problematic research.

(See @eve.gd & @ernestopriego.com's great paper on the problems of judging the "container" research is published in: www.triple-c.at/index.php/tr...)

Beyond the reputation and impact factor of a journal, some journalists saw typos/grammar mistakes were "red flags."

Others equated #openaccess with predatory, expressing suspicion about any journal that was free to read.

That gut feeling hinged largely on markers of prestige, impact, and familiarity.

Some journalists, like this one, said they would never report on research from an unfamiliar journal:

Many journalists were unaware of these journals.

Others knew about them but were unconcerned: The journals were a problem in theory, or for their colleagues, but not a problem for them.

With years of experience, they said they had developed a "gut instinct" for telling "good" from "bad" journals.

In the study, we interviewed 23 science, health, and environmental journalists from Europe and North America.

We asked about their perceptions of predatory journals, and what strategies they used to decide if a journal is trustworthy.

Predatory journals prioritize profit over editorial and publishing best practices.

For example, some have no real peer review process, and publish more or less anything authors submit.

(Read about a hilarious example here: www.vox.com/2014/11/21/7...)