I started working in science communication in 2006. Back then, the conversation about how research reached the public was remarkably 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. That was the pipeline. It was narrow, it was slow, and it meant that the vast majority of research never reached anyone outside a small circle of specialists. But it was at least understood.
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 Research Excellence Framework in the UK has made impact a formal component of how university research is assessed and funded. The expectation that scientists will communicate their work beyond the academy is no longer optional. It is structural.
And yet, for all of these shifts, the actual infrastructure for getting science to the public has not kept pace. The rules have changed. The tools have not. That is the gap I have spent my career trying to close.
How Open Access and Funder Mandates Are Reshaping Science Communication
Open access publishing, the principle that research should be freely available to anyone rather than locked behind journal paywalls, has been one of the most significant shifts in academic publishing over the past two decades. In theory, it solves a major problem: the public, who often fund the research through taxes, can now read the results without paying for access.
In practice, open access has created a different problem. The research is technically available, but it is written for specialists, formatted for journals, and buried on publisher platforms that the general public has no reason to visit. Making something accessible is not the same as making it understood. Open access opened the door, but nobody built the path from the door to the public.
At the same time, funders have become increasingly serious about public engagement. UKRI, Wellcome, the European Research Council, and others now expect grant holders to demonstrate that their research has reached people beyond academia. The REF, which is the UK's system for assessing the quality and impact of university research, explicitly evaluates non-academic impact. This is not a box-ticking exercise. It directly affects institutional funding and reputation.
Having worked with over 14,000 academics across every discipline, I have seen first-hand how these policy shifts play out in practice. Researchers are under real pressure to demonstrate impact. They know they need to communicate their work more broadly. But most of them were never trained to do it, and most institutions do not have the resources to support them properly.
Why Universities Are Struggling with Outreach and Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge transfer, the process of moving research findings from the academic setting into wider society where they can be applied and understood, has become a priority for almost every research institution in the UK and beyond. Universities are hiring outreach officers, building engagement teams, and investing in public-facing content at a scale that would have been unthinkable when I started in this field.
The problem is not a lack of effort. It is a lack of specialist capability.
Most university communications teams are stretched across dozens of competing priorities: 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 cannot.
The alternative is to bring in external agencies. But here is where another gap appears. Most creative agencies understand design. They understand video production, web development, and graphic design. What they do not understand is science. They do not know how to work with a researcher who thinks in caveats and confidence intervals. They do not 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 have spent nearly twenty years sitting in exactly this gap, between the academic who knows the science inside out and the audience who needs to understand it. That is where Scrolly Science operates. We are not a design agency that occasionally works with scientists. We are a science communication agency that has worked with over 14,000 of them. The distinction matters.
The Dissemination Problem That Nobody Has Solved
Even when outreach content is produced well, and even when it genuinely reflects the researcher's work and voice, there is still the question of whether anyone actually sees it.
Scientific dissemination, the active process of getting research findings in front of new audiences rather than waiting for them to arrive, remains the weakest link in the chain for most institutions. A university might produce a beautifully designed impact case study or a compelling public engagement video. It goes on the website. It gets shared on the institutional social media accounts. And then it 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 do not reflect the quality of the work.
This is not a new problem. I have been watching it for nearly two decades. But it has become more acute as the expectation of impact has grown. Funders want evidence that research reached people. The REF wants evidence that it made a difference. You cannot provide that evidence if nobody saw the content.
Getting science content seen on social media and beyond requires dedicated strategy, platform-specific expertise, and sustained promotional effort. It is not something you can bolt on at the end of a project. It is not something a PhD student can handle alongside their actual research. It requires the same level of professional commitment as the content creation itself, and in many cases more.
Having generated over half a billion social media impressions for the researchers I have worked with since 2006, I can say with confidence that dissemination is not a minor operational detail. It is the factor that determines whether science communication actually works or simply exists.
Why the Complete Pipeline Matters: Strategy, Creation, Dissemination, and Impact
This is what Scrolly Science was built to provide. Not just one part of the process, but all of it.
We start with strategy: understanding the research, identifying the right audiences, and defining what success looks like. We move into creation: working directly with the researcher to produce content in their voice, across the formats that will actually reach people, whether that is video, animation, audio, editorial, or interactive media. Then we handle dissemination: actively promoting the content across all major social media platforms and other channels, using the platform expertise we have built over nearly twenty years. And finally, we measure 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 are integrated, designed together from the start by a team that understands every stage of the process.
Scrolly Science, part of Animara Studios, was not designed in a boardroom. It was built over nearly two decades of working with over 14,000 academics, learning what actually moves the needle on public understanding of science, and building the infrastructure to do it consistently and at scale.
Where Science Communication Is Heading
The institutions and researchers who will 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.
The pressure is only going to increase. Funders will demand more evidence of public engagement. Impact frameworks will become 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 be the ones whose work shapes public understanding and policy. The ones who cannot will remain invisible, regardless of how significant their findings are.
The tools and platforms for science communication are better and more accessible than they have 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 that it reaches beyond the usual circles: that requires specialist knowledge built over years of practice.
Scrolly Science has spent nearly twenty years building exactly that expertise. We have worked with over 14,000 academics, generated over half a billion social media impressions, and built science communication brands across every major format. The future of science communication belongs to the institutions and researchers who invest in the complete pipeline, from strategy through creation to dissemination and measurable impact. That is what we do, and the need for it has never been clearer.
Simon Jones is the founder of Scrolly Science and Animara Studios. Since 2006, he has worked with over 14,000 academics across every scientific discipline, generating over half a billion social media impressions and building award-winning science communication brands across magazine, podcast, video, and animation formats.