SHARE Your Research Competition

NEW DEADLINE: Friday 15th of April

SHARE your bioenergy research! 

Background: Publishing in good scientific journals is essential to share your research with the academic community in your field.  Exhibiting with the SUPERGEN Bioenergy Hub stand at numerous events has highlighted that there are many other groups, including industry and policymakers, who would find research outputs useful but who do not usually read academic papers.  Similarly there are many academics without a specialist understanding of a particular field who would also benefit from a concise description of your work and its wider relevance.  Further, funding agencies and REF assessments are increasingly requiring researchers to outline the (anticipated) impact of their research for success. Communicating your research effectively to all these stakeholders is therefore equally essential to your researcher role and future success.

To encourage good practice in communicating scientific research outputs, the SUPERGEN Bioenergy Hub SHARE Network is teaming up with publisher Elsevier to run the 2016 SHARE Your Research Competition.

The challenge: Your challenge is to take a bioenergy paper (first published online on or after 1^st August 2012), where you appeared as (co-)author, and to communicate it in a short form that makes it accessible to a wider audience. The short form could take many formats (e.g. a digest featuring text or bullet points, a pictorial representation, a short audio/video summary, an automated slide presentation with/without audio, etc.), but the communication piece must be created (or adapted) specifically for this competition and must be suitable for sharing with the general public online, without specialist software requirements.

The prize: The entries will be judged by an expert panel, including representatives from academia, industry, publishing and policy. The winner will be announced at the All-Energy Exhibition and Conference 2016 in Glasgow on 5th May.

The winning entry will receive a £250 Amazon voucher, a complimentary one-year personal online subscription to Biomass & Bioenergy (or another Elsevier Energy journal of the winner’s choice), and a small trophy.  The winning entry will also be publicised on the SUPERGEN Bioenergy Hub website and on the news section of the Biomass & Bioenergy homepage on Elsevier.com. All entries commended by the judges will have their communication pieces hosted on the SUPERGEN Hub website.

Entry requirements: The competition is open to early career bioenergy researchers at any UK university, who do not hold a permanent academic post at the closing date of 1 April 2016.

All entries must be suitable for online presentation, and intelligible to a general audience without the use of specialist software or other tools.  In addition:

• Audio and video submissions should be no longer than 4 minutes.
• Text-based submissions should be no longer than 500 words.
• Graphic-based submissions should be designed so that a non-expert can fully understand the content in no more than 4 minutes.

The original paper should have been first published online on or after 1^st August 2012.

How to apply: Entries must be received by email no later than 18.00 (GMT) on Friday 8^th April 2016. Entrants should include the following in their application:

1.) a completed application form

2.) a copy of the original published paper

3.) the submission (in whatever format has been selected to best communicate the research outcomes)

Please send these to Laura.OKeefe@manchester.ac.uk with the subject line: “2016 SHARE Your Research Competition”. If you have any queries about acceptable submission formats or your eligibility please contact Dr Laura O’ Keefe c/o Laura.OKeefe@manchester.ac.uk.

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Like this, want more?  The SHARE Network runs regular training, networking and field trip events for early career bioenergy researchers and PhD students.  To hear about future opportunities, join our mailing list: send an email to listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk with the body text SUBSCRIBE SHARE-NETWORK [your forename] [your surname].

Visit http://supergen-bioenergy.net/share/ to find out what they are up to next!