Potential impact

The potential impact and long term benefits from  the project come directly from its main goal which is to  develop policy recommendations with regard to scientific avalanches and public understanding of science.  The analytical results of the project can be directly used by scientific policy makers in the creation of the European research area.
The project addresses the question of robustness of a specific social institution. The emergence of public trust in science is an important goal for science policies which orient on the public understanding of science. Scientists and institutions as actors in the science system are embedded in society. The project develops a specific network view on this interaction. The aim is to describe the interaction of science and the public as interaction between different actor networks (networks of scientists and specialties vs. networks of journalists and public media). It is evident that in the mutual interaction between science and society specific patterns appear which can be described as complex phenomena. The project focuses on the sudden raising of certain topics in science (scientific avalanches or new research fronts) and sudden transitions in the public perception of science. Dominant themes in the public perception of science (for instance the genetically modified food debate) often occur in the form of an avalanche like phenomena in different communication networks. Media effects are central both in science and the public perception. Public debates resonate with the development of research fronts inside of science (scientific avalanches).
As a result of the project a “complexity” view of the development of science policies will emerge. In this view scenarios developed in the physics of complex networks are integrated with methods to observe real information avalanches and their evaluation with the objective of developing adequate policies to respond.
As part of the project we will develop models of the emergence of information avalanches in coupled complex social networks. On-line and off-line information sources will be used to (a) produce useful indicators that will help policy makers to identify problematic public discussions of science that threaten EU science policy objectives, and (b) to identify key interfaces between policy making and the public debates. This is a highly challenging project because each public discussion of a new science area will have some unique characteristics relating to the specific topic and its history, in addition to the complexity in the web. The insights of the project will be disseminated among and discussed with different participants in public debates (policy makers, science journalists, scientific and lay experts).
Although the project does not have an open-ended nature and is focused on social applications its potential impact can be much wider. Since the project also produces fundamental tools for the analysis of critical events in complex networks the results will have universal potential. Applications may be used in various interdisciplinary studies including floods in river networks, effective species protection in food webs, trade network crashes, overflows in Internet and others. Future projects specializing in one of these areas of life can benefit from the achievements of the CREEN project.