I have spent nearly twenty years working in science communication. Since 2006, I have worked with over 14,000 academics across every scientific discipline you can name, from quantum physics to marine biology to clinical neuroscience. I have built science communication brands across magazines, podcasts, video, and animation. I have helped generate over half a billion social media impressions for the researchers I have worked with. And I can tell you, with absolute confidence, that scientific communication is in worse shape today than at any point in the last two decades.
That is not a comfortable thing to say. There are more tools available than ever. More platforms. More ways to reach people. And yet the gap between what scientists know and what the public believes is widening, not narrowing. Something has gone fundamentally wrong.
Why Scientists Are Losing the Communication Battle
The biggest problem with science communication today is not a lack of good science. It is a lack of good pipelines. The research exists. The expertise exists. What does not exist, in most cases, is a credible, effective route from the lab to the public.
Instead, that space has been filled by three forces that are actively making things worse.
First, AI-generated content. The internet is now flooded with shallow, often inaccurate science summaries produced by large language models with no understanding of the source material. These summaries look polished. They read well. And they are frequently wrong in ways that are difficult for a non-specialist to spot. The volume of this content is staggering, and it is drowning out the real thing.
Second, governments and institutions that treat science communication as a political tool. I have watched this happen repeatedly over the past decade. Data gets cherry-picked. Findings get reframed to support policy positions that were decided before the evidence was even collected. The public is not stupid. They can sense when they are being managed rather than informed, and it erodes trust in everything that follows, including the legitimate science.
Third, social media platforms that reward engagement over accuracy. The algorithms do not care whether something is true. They care whether it gets clicks, shares, and comments. Pseudoscience packaged in a slick Instagram carousel will outperform a peer-reviewed study shared by a university press office every single time. Not because the pseudoscience is better, but because it was designed for the platform. Most scientific institutions have no idea how to compete in that environment, and honestly, most of them are not even trying.
The Growing Crisis of Scientific Authority
This is not just a communication problem. It is an authority problem. The people who actually do the research, who spend years gathering evidence and subjecting it to rigorous peer review, are almost never the ones telling their own story to the public. That job has been outsourced to press officers, journalists, politicians, and now AI chatbots, each of whom introduces their own distortions.
Having worked with over 14,000 researchers across every discipline, I can tell you that the expertise is there. The willingness is often there too. What is missing is the infrastructure to help scientists communicate their own work, in their own voice, in formats that actually reach people.
When a government minister misrepresents a dataset on breakfast television, there is no mechanism for the scientist who produced that data to correct the record at the same scale. When an AI chatbot confidently delivers a half-truth about vaccine safety or climate projections, the original researcher has no way to intervene. The public ends up making decisions based on third-hand interpretations of science that the scientists themselves would barely recognise.
This is the authority crisis. The people with the least expertise have the loudest platforms, and the people with the most expertise are essentially invisible to the general public.
Putting the Scientist Back at the Centre of the Story
This is why I built Scrolly Science. Not as another design agency that makes science look pretty. Not as a PR firm that rewrites research into press releases. Scrolly Science exists to do something that almost nobody else in this industry does properly: put the scientist back at the centre of their own story, and then make sure that story actually gets seen.
We work directly with researchers to create content in their voice. Not a sanitised, corporate-friendly version of their voice. Their actual voice, with their actual expertise, their actual opinions, and the nuance that makes real science valuable. We produce this across every modern format: video, animation, audio, interactive content, and editorial. I have been building science communication brands across these formats since 2006, from magazines to podcasts to full animation productions, and the principle has never changed. If you want the public to trust science, the public needs to hear from the scientists.
But here is the part that most science communication agencies get wrong, and it is the part I feel most strongly about after nearly two decades in this industry. Creating great content is only half the job. The other half, the half that almost everyone ignores, is dissemination.
Scientific dissemination, the process of getting research findings to the people who actually need them, is broken in most institutional settings. A university will spend thousands on a beautifully produced video and then post it on their YouTube channel to an audience of 300 subscribers. That is not dissemination. That is decoration.
At Scrolly Science, we actively promote the content we create across all major social media platforms. We do not hand researchers a finished product and wish them luck. We run the campaigns. We manage the channels. We get the work in front of real audiences. That is how we have generated over half a billion social media impressions for the researchers we serve. Not through tricks or paid hype, but through sustained, strategic, platform-native promotion of real science told by real scientists.
Why This Matters More Now Than It Ever Has
The information environment is getting noisier by the month. AI-generated content is accelerating. Political manipulation of science is not slowing down. Social media algorithms are not suddenly going to start prioritising accuracy over engagement. Every trend that is making science communication harder is intensifying, not retreating.
If the scientific community does not learn to communicate with the same sophistication that misinformation operators already use, the gap between evidence and public belief will keep growing. That is not an abstract concern. It affects public health decisions, climate policy, food safety, technology regulation, and a hundred other areas where the public deserves access to accurate, trustworthy information from the people who actually produced it.
This is not a problem that can be solved by universities hiring one more social media officer or by funders adding a "public engagement" checkbox to grant applications. It requires dedicated, specialist infrastructure built by people who understand both the science and the communication. Strategy, creation, dissemination, and impact measurement, all integrated, all informed by deep experience.
That is what Scrolly Science provides. We offer a complete science communication service: from initial strategy through to content creation, active dissemination across social media, and measurable impact reporting. We work with researchers directly, in their voice, across every format, and we have been doing it since 2006 with over 14,000 academics across every scientific discipline.
The scientific community has the expertise. It has the evidence. What it needs are partners who know how to get that expertise and evidence to the people who need it most, without distorting it along the way.
That is all we do. And after nearly twenty years, I would argue it has never been more important.
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.