When I started in science communication in 2006, the pipeline for getting research to the public was simple. You published in a journal. If you were lucky, a journalist wrote about it. If you were very lucky, it made the evening news. Narrow, slow, and it meant the vast majority of research never reached anyone outside a small circle of specialists. But at least everyone understood how it worked.
Nearly twenty years later, almost everything about that model has changed. Open access mandates have transformed how research is distributed. Preprint servers have challenged the traditional gatekeeping role of journals. Funders now routinely require evidence of public engagement and societal impact, not just citation counts. The REF in the UK has made impact a formal component of how university research is assessed and funded. The expectation that scientists will communicate beyond the academy isn't optional any more. It's structural.
And yet, the actual infrastructure for getting science to the public hasn't kept pace. The rules changed. The tools didn't. That's the gap I've spent my career trying to close.
Open Access Opened the Door. Nobody Built the Path.
Open access publishing, the principle that research should be freely available rather than locked behind journal paywalls, has been one of the most significant shifts in academic publishing in the last twenty years. In theory, it solves a major problem: the public, who often fund the research through their taxes, can now read the results.
In practice, it's created a different problem. The research is technically available, but it's written for specialists, formatted for journals, and buried on publisher platforms that the general public has no reason to visit. Making something accessible isn't the same as making it understood.
At the same time, funders have got increasingly serious about engagement. UKRI, Wellcome, the ERC and others now expect grant holders to demonstrate their research has reached people beyond academia. The REF explicitly evaluates non-academic impact. This isn't a box-ticking exercise. It directly affects institutional funding and reputation.
I've seen first-hand how these policy shifts play out. Researchers are under real pressure to demonstrate impact. They know they need to communicate more broadly. But most were never trained to do it, and most institutions don't have the resources to support them properly.
Universities Are Trying. Most Are Struggling.
Knowledge transfer has become a priority for almost every research institution in the UK and beyond. Universities are hiring outreach officers, building engagement teams, investing in public-facing content. All of which would have been unthinkable when I started.
The problem isn't a lack of effort. It's a lack of specialist capability.
Most university comms teams are stretched across student recruitment, alumni relations, fundraising, reputation management, and somewhere in the middle of all that, research communication. Expecting the same team to produce world-class science content on top of everything else is unrealistic. Some manage it brilliantly. Most can't.
The alternative is external agencies. But here's where another gap opens up. Most creative agencies understand design. They understand video production, web development, graphic design. What they don't understand is science. They don't know how to work with a researcher who thinks in caveats and confidence intervals. They don't know how to translate complex methodology without stripping out the nuance that makes the findings meaningful. They make things that look impressive but say very little.
I've spent nearly two decades sitting in exactly that gap. Between the academic who knows the science inside out and the audience who needs to understand it. That's where Scrolly Science operates. We're not a design agency that occasionally works with scientists. We're a science communication agency that has worked with over 14,000 of them. The distinction matters.
Nobody Sees It. That's Still the Problem.
Even when outreach content is produced well, even when it genuinely reflects the researcher's work and voice, there's still the question of whether anyone actually sees it.
A university might produce a beautifully designed impact case study or a compelling engagement video. It goes on the website. Gets shared on the institutional social accounts. Reaches the same few thousand people who already follow those accounts. The researchers who needed that content to demonstrate real-world impact are left with engagement numbers that don't reflect the quality of the work.
Getting science content seen requires dedicated strategy, platform-specific expertise and sustained promotional effort. It's not something you bolt on at the end of a project. It's not something a PhD student can handle alongside their actual research. It requires the same level of professional commitment as the content creation itself. In many cases, more.
Why the Complete Pipeline Matters
Scrolly Science was built to provide the full chain. Strategy: understanding the research, identifying audiences, defining what success looks like. Creation: working directly with the researcher to produce content in their voice, across formats that will actually reach people. Dissemination: actively promoting content across social media and other channels. And impact: providing the evidence that the work reached real audiences and made a demonstrable difference.
A science communication agency that only handles creation is solving less than half the problem. A dissemination strategy without authentic, researcher-led content has nothing worth promoting. These elements only work when they're integrated. Designed together from the start by a team that understands every stage.
Where This Is All Heading
The institutions and researchers who'll thrive over the next decade are those who treat communication and dissemination as core parts of the research lifecycle, not afterthoughts bolted on when a funder asks for an impact statement.
Funders will demand more evidence of public engagement. Impact frameworks will get more rigorous. The public's appetite for trustworthy, accessible science is growing, even as their trust in traditional institutions declines. The researchers who can bridge that gap will shape public understanding and policy. The ones who can't will remain invisible, regardless of how significant their findings are.
The tools are better than they've ever been. But the expertise gap is real. Understanding how to tell a scientific story authentically, how to design it for the platforms where audiences actually are, and how to promote it so it reaches beyond the usual circles: that takes years of practice to learn.
Scrolly Science has spent nearly twenty years building exactly that expertise. The future belongs to the institutions and researchers who invest in the complete pipeline. That's what we do, and the need for it has never been clearer.