Science communication has become a crucial issue for academic and scientific institutions. Many have incorporated it into their missions, adopted policies for communication, while enhancing their communication structures to support relationships with the media, policy makers and the wider public. Still, our understanding of what institutions are doing and under what conditions is limited. In this grouped paper, a panel of science communication researchers will present preliminary results of an international study ‘MORE-PE- Mobilisation of REsources for Public Engagement’ aimed at mapping science communication at the level of research institutes (RIs) in Portugal, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, the USA, Brazil, Japan, Taiwan and China. Representative samples of RIs by areas of research were drawn using stratified random probability sampling procedures (N=1200 per country). Data collection will be complete in October 2017. This will be the first presentation of the results on the country level. Panellists will provide an account of national institutional practices in their countries, and discuss it in light of national science and policy contexts for science communication. Each country will cover: (1) generic national policy/encouragement for PE (2) national research system and description of populations and national samples, and (3) key findings of interest, including but not limited to ‘what’, ‘to whom’, ‘why’ and ‘under conditions’ are RIs addressing non-specialists.

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Institutional science communication,public engagement,comparative studies