2.3 Recommendations - InterAcademy Council

With the help of the S&T communities, each national and state government should encourage innovation in disseminating the results of publicly or privately funded research and in turning them into new products and services that address national or local needs. Such efforts could include:

Consultative services, provided by national, state, or city research institutions, in areas such as agriculture, water and land management, housing, and health.
Cooperative partnerships between local (state, city) entities and research institutions for sharing up-to-date information of local relevance.
Empowerment, for periods of time, of social entrepreneurs for supplying products and services significantly below market prices to people in need.
'Information kiosks,' either publicly funded or for-profit, to help distribute useful scientific information to the public. The information might consist of short publica-tions prepared by scientific organizations, such as the recent ones being promoted by the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), or reliable news obtained from the Internet.

Each nation's media should assume major responsibility for educating the public in S&T-related issues.
A wide array of communications technologies - print, television, radio, cellular tele-phone, World Wide Web, the Internet, among others - should be utilized in dissemi-nating to the public the results and public policy implications of publicly or privately funded research that addresses national or local needs.
The S&T community should seriously exercise its obligation to pay more attention to the media and participate more fully in public discussions and debates. In such interactions, practitioners should endeavor to explain technical issues in non-technical language.
Regarding scientific or technical matters on which public-policy choices are to be made, the media should seek out the best S&T sources for their articles and programs. In a similar spirit, reporters and editors should not artificially generate controversy by seeking out minority positions that appear to highlight the adversarial aspects of S&T-related questions, particularly when the professional community has actually achieved broad consensus.
Truly controversial questions should be presented to the public in terms of explaining the scientific and technological aspects of the dispute without bias or editorializing (except on clearly indicated opinion pages).