Acknowledging full or partial federal sponsor support in all publications and presentations is a requirement of federal awards. These acknowledgements serve the important role of raising public awareness of the value of their tax contribution to advances in science, improvements in health and technology and help agencies justify budget requests to Congress. Both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (the major sponsors of research funding at Yale) encourage researchers to “get the word out” about newsworthy research results.
The NSF recently reminded investigators that they might not be taking advantage of standard public affairs techniques such as media interviews or new ones such as multimedia websites. Public information officers are often the key to this kind of dissemination.
The Office of Public Affairs (OPA) at Yale strongly supports the NSF and the NIH initiatives on accountability to the public and wants to help you get the word out about your newsworthy research results.
OPA can advise you on when and how to publicize your results — and can co-ordinate with the NSF, NIH and other sponsors to do so by arranging press releases, media interviews, netcasts and materials for multimedia web sites.
When you have newsworthy results:
- contact OPA at 432-1345, especially if you are publishing in a high profile journal (ideally by the time the paper has been accepted for publication)
- tell OPA who funded the research so that they can provide coordination with the sponsor
- contact NSF yourself by sending a message to tellus@nsf.gov
Keeping the public informed about the contributions of scientific research to improvements in our knowledge of the world around us, in technology and health is an important goal shared by sponsors and grantees alike.