This article contains content that is written like an advertisement .(March 2021) |
Type | Online Media Outlet |
---|---|
Founder(s) | David Dickson |
Founded | 2001 |
Website | www |
Science and Development Network, also known as SciDev.net, is a not-for-profit organisation that produces news, views, and analysis about science and technology in the context of global development. It primarily engages with development professionals, policymakers, researchers, the media, and the informed public. [1]
The organisation was founded in 2001 [1] in response to the significant gap in scientific knowledge between rich and poor countries and with the understanding that “those who stand to benefit the most from modern science and technology are also those with the least access to information about it." [2] SciDev.Net seeks to redress this imbalance via its free-to-access website, regional networks, and specialist workshops.
SciDev.Net aims to help individuals and organisations apply evidence and insights from science and technology to decision-making in order to have a positive impact on equitable and sustainable development and poverty reduction.
The global edition is based in London, and there are six regional desks based in Latin America and the Caribbean (Spanish), the Middle East and North and West Africa (Arabic), South Asia, South-East Asia and the Pacific, and Sub-Saharan Africa (English and French).
SciDev.Net is a company limited by guarantee and a registered charity in England and Wales (registered charity number 1089590).
The SciDev.Net website is made up of a global and six regional editions. SciDev.Net publishes in four languages: English, Spanish, French, and Arabic. Content includes: news, analysis, multimedia, practical guides, learning series reports, opinions editorials, spotlights and data visualisations.
News: SciDev.Net's news coverage is at the heart of its website, and articles are added daily. Freelance journalists throughout the developing world write much of this material and work closely with a team of editors to ensure timely and accurate coverage of breaking news.
Analysis blogs: SciDev.Net analysis blogs focus on vulnerable or marginalised groups who tend to be neglected in mainstream development journalism. They aim to bridge the gap between science and development and provide an analysis of how each can inform the other. SciDev.Net analysis blogs include:
Opinions: SciDev.Net opinion pieces are exclusive contributions from the world’s leading experts in science and international development. SciDev.Net has published exclusive contributions from figures such as Calestous Juma, Paul Boateng, Mark Lynas, Gordon Conway and Mariéme Jamme.
Multimedia: SciDev.Net produces original multimedia content such as videos, podcasts, photo essays, image galleries and audio-video slideshows.
Practical guides: Written by experts in their field, practical guides help readers strengthen and learn new skills. These guides:
Spotlights: These special collections of articles focus on a ‘hot topic’ and provide an in-depth look at the key issues facing developing countries. Spotlights published to date include:
Data visualisations: Since 2014 SciDev.Net has been producing data visualisations. These interactive features transforms the latest issues in international development into accessible information that informs data-led decision making. SciDev.Net have worked with a number of partners, including SightSavers, to produce data visualisations on a wide variety of topics including:
The SciDev.Net website was restructured and relaunched in March 2008 [13] to provide access to material via ‘topic gateways’, which bring together news updates and analysis on key issues. The topics covered are:
Science and technology news is also available via ‘regional editions’:
Coverage is informed by regional advisory groups consisting of an extensive number of journalists, consultants, advisors and registered users based in developing countries. They work to ensure that a developing country perspective is represented.
SciDev.Net has over 15 years’ experience of specifically supporting southern journalists and researchers to communicate scientific evidence through workshops and on-the-job mentoring. Since its inception, SciDev.Net has delivered workshops for approximately 1,500 journalists.
In 2013 SciDev.Net piloted a new approach to capacity building centered upon training for trainers. The new approach provides a blend of face-to-face workshops, networking programmes, awards, mentoring and online learning for journalists, researchers and policymakers.
Visitors who sign-up with SciDev.Net receive a free weekly and/or daily email with all the latest stories from the website. These are available for each edition English, Spanish, Arabic and French. Those who sign-up can comment on articles and submit announcements, events, jobs and grants to the noticeboard for free and these are featured on the website and in the weekly emails.
The latest news can appear instantly on other websites through a free SciDev.Net global, regional or topic specific newsfeed. Each newsfeed carries the latest news stories, including a headline, introductory sentence and link to the full article.
For busy researchers or editors who need to sift through information from many sources, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) enables instantaneous delivery of SciDev.Net news stories to a 'news reader' soon as they are published.
All SciDev.Net website material is free to reproduce under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence. Under the terms of this licence users are permitted to copy, distribute, display and perform the content, and make derivative works so long as the original author and website are quoted as the source.
Hundreds of media outlets have syndicated SciDev.Net’s work including global media houses such as The Guardian, The BBC and The Thomson Reuters Foundation as well as regional news networks like AllAfrica, The Asian Scientist and Dawn.
Funders of SciDev.Net include: [14]
Partners SciDev.Net works with a range of organisations at global, regional and national levels to achieve shared objectives. These include:
SciDev.Net is also affiliated with TWAS, the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, based in Trieste, Italy. [21]
The International Energy Agency (IEA) is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organisation, established in 1974, that provides policy recommendations, analysis and data on the global energy sector. The 31 member countries and 13 association countries of the IEA represent 75% of global energy demand.
A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). American Chemical Society converted its printed Chemical Abstract Service into internet-accessible SciFinder in 2008. The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.
The World Academy of Sciencesfor the advancement of science in developing countries (TWAS) is a merit-based science academy established for developing countries, uniting more than 1,400 scientists in some 100 countries. Its principal aim is to promote scientific capacity and excellence for sustainable development in developing countries. It was formerly known as the Third World Academy of Sciences. Its headquarters is located on the premises of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.
The African Academy of Sciences (AAS) is a non-aligned, non-political, not-for-profit, pan-African learned society formed in 1985.
INASP is an international development charity working with a global network of partners to improve access, production and use of research information and knowledge, so that countries are equipped to solve their development challenges.
The German Institute for Global and Area Studies, also known as GIGA, is a German research institute. It analyses political, economic, and social developments in Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as the Middle East. It combines its analysis with comparative research on international relations, development and globalisation, violence and security, and political systems. GIGA researchers are sought after by policymakers to advise Germany's Federal Foreign Office, members of Parliament and other branches of the German federal government. The institute is based in Hamburg and has an office in Berlin.
African Journals OnLine (AJOL) is a South African non-profit organization, that lies in the headquarters of Grahamstown.It is dedicated to improving the online visibility and access to the published scholarly research of African-based academics. By using the internet as a gateway, AJOL aims to enhance conditions for African learning as well as African development.
The World Association of Young Scientists is a global network of young scientists established in 2004, in partnership with UNESCO and ICSU. It provides a Web 2.0 platform for scientific exchange, thereby linking individuals and existing networks with a regional or disciplinary focus.
AuthorAID is the name given to a number of initiatives that provide support to researchers from developing countries in preparing academic articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Phyllis Freeman and Anthony Robbins, co-editors of the Journal of Public Health Policy (JPHP), first suggested the name and concept in 2004 and published "Closing the ‘publishing gap’ between rich and poor" about AuthorAID on the Science and Development Network (SciDev.Net), in 2005.
The South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) is a science network of people, organisations and, most importantly observation platforms, that perform Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) in South Africa and its surrounding oceans. The SAEON is of global importance as an innovative approach in ecology to understand environmental change and to determine the impact of anthropogenic forces at multiple scales but it is a remarkably complex challenge to statistically discern between ubiquitous natural variability and exogenous forcing. The SAEON constitutes a national government response to the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Earth Summit 2002) and is a component of the GEO (Group on Earth Observations). The SAEON has become the leader in environmental science and observation in South Africa, but has been criticised for taking a long time to establish, a situation which was inevitable in view of SAEON's multiple stakeholder corps. It has also been raised that the cost of replicated experimental treatments across SAEON sites will be high.
Gephi is an open-source network analysis and visualization software package written in Java on the NetBeans platform.
The Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) was established in 2006 and compiles and analyzes information to help design and evaluate rural development strategies and monitor the progress of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). CAADP is a program of the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which aims to increase the share of national budgets allocated to agriculture.
The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) is a research centre at University College London (UCL), which specialises in the application and visualisation of spatial analytic techniques and simulation models to cities and regions. It is a constituent department of The Bartlett Faculty of the Built-Environment.
Romain Murenzi is a Rwandan-American physicist and former Rwandan science minister. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Burundi in 1982. In 1986 he received his master's degree in physics from Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and in 1990 earned his doctorate degree there. Murenzi was the executive director of TWAS, The World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries in Trieste, Italy. He first served in that role from April 2011 to May 2016. Then, after spending 14 months as director of the Division of Science Policy and Capacity Building in the Natural Sciences sector for UNESCO in Paris, France, he returned to his role as executive director of TWAS in September 2017 until stepping down in November 2023 to teach at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Robert Muggah is a political scientist, urbanist, and security expert. He is the co-founder of the Igarapé Institute and the SecDev Group, where he is known for his work on urbanization, crime prevention, arms control, migration, cyber-security, the digital economy, conflict and development studies. He regularly advises national and city governments, management consulting and technology firms, United Nations agencies ,and the World Bank.
The Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD) is an office of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) established in 2011 to further the use of astronomy as a tool for development. The OAD is jointly funded by the International Astronomical Union and the National Research Foundation of South Africa. The office consists of eleven regional offices located in Armenia, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, Jordan, Nigeria, Portugal, Thailand, the Netherlands, United States, and Zambia which have similar objectives to the OAD but with regional focus. The OAD annually issues a call for proposals to fund projects which use Astronomy as a tool to address an issue related to sustainable development. The mission of the OAD is to help further the use of astronomy as a tool for development by mobilizing the human and financial resources necessary in order to realize the field's scientific, technological and cultural benefits to society. As of 2023 the OAD had administered a total of €1.1 Million in IAU grant funds. These funds have been awarded to 215 projects that reached over 100 countries across the world.
Folakemi Titilayo Odedina is a Nigerian-born scientist and professor of pharmacy and medicine at the University of Florida. She is the principal investigator for the Prostate Cancer Transatlantic Consortium (CaPTC), a clinical research group using genomic science and environmental etiology to exploring disproportionate burden of prostate cancer among Black men funded by the NCI. She is a member of American Cancer Society's National Prostate Cancer Disparities Advisory Team.
North–south research partnerships consist of collaborations between researchers from countries in the global north and the global south. By establishing equal partnerships in north–south research, economic, social and cultural boundaries can be overcome. Such partnerships can address and enable research of issues in dynamic and complex contexts, as well as deal with uncertainties. Moreover, such research cooperation allows different perspectives to be taken into account to explore issues that are strongly value driven or linked to conflicting interests and power claims. So north–south research partnerships provide new insights in the transition towards sustainable development and facilitate the development of solutions to local and global challenges.
Dataphyte is a media, research, and data analytics organisation operating as an access to information for development program and as an end-to-end data-as-a-service platform offering data services. Dataphyte uses data science and artificial intelligence tools to gather, curate, store and offer data on diverse subjects including government policy, economy, market trends, health, education, security, election, climate and in extractive industry. Dataphyte transforms generated data into machine-readable formats, generates interactive visualisations, analyse and publish insights into the data making it an open data source for journalists, civil society organisations and researchers.