I love your idea about including communications trainings as part of the workshops one most take to get started at a new institution. Having access to a “how to engage with the public and media” workshop should be just as easy as taking one about “how to write a grant proposal”.

I enjoyed your post, thanks for sharing.

I agree 100% that the self-promotion doesn’t become the outreach activity – in fact, there is (in some circles in Academia) a strong distaste for social media as a form of outreach because many people believe blogs, twitter etc are ONLY for self-promotion. That is wrong, of course, BUT this does need to be considered. Again, this is why training is critical, and why the approach to outreach needs to be done carefully.

The point about timing is a good one – I blog, etc for mostly personal reasons – I love doing it, it brings much personal satisfaction, and I see it was a major bonus when it helps and connects to my teaching and research. I tend to write blogs at very unusual times, and times that I wouldn’t have normally committed to my normal work duties. So, for me, it’s not been a struggle to find the time, nor has it interfered with my productivity. However, if it did interfere with my teaching, training graduate students, research etc, that would be a serious and justified problem. Related to this (and you comment about how it gets faster with time), doing outreach really doesn’t take much time!!

Incentivising this kind of work would be great for all the reasons you say, but I think we have to be careful with some incentive structures (e.g., promotions) that it doesn’t mean we spend more time promoting ourselves than our science – I know many colleagues who already conflate the two with respect to other leading public figures in my field.

Time is a major issue, and one I don’t have any solutions to. In my experience, academics already work some of the most ridiculous hours I know of (what are weekends again?) My response to questions about this, is that if you don’t see the value in science outreach, and don’t enjoy it, then don’t do it! This isn’t for everyone, but it’s our role as scientists who practise it already to communicate with our colleagues that it is worth spending a bit of extra time blogging (which does get faster with time), or a day out to give a public talk or whatever.

But yeah, great post! I hope to see these thoughts developed in the public and academic forums in the future