Funding available for Professional Science Communication

Support for projects within science communication to promote popular education and general interest in basic research and science. The Carlsberg Foundation wants to promote collaborations between professional communicators and researchers in order to strengthen research and the position of science in society and in public conversation and debate.

Objectives

• The Carlsberg Foundation wants to:
  • Support the communication of basic research and science to non-scientific audiences
  • Support the communication of science in relation to current, socially relevant issues
  • Contribute to public, fact-based debate that includes research and science
  • Promote relationships and collaboration between professional communicators and researchers
  • Increase public interest in, and curiosity about, science, scientific themes and current research
  • Strengthen awareness of, and confidence in, reliable scientific sources, partly with a view to countering misinformation with fact-based knowledge

Funding Information

• Communication projects for a period of maximum three years with an amount of DKK 200,000 – DKK 3,000,000.
• The project may be independently defined or part of a larger project, and the project may be co-financed with funds from another party.
• The project must communicate basic research or science. Basic research is understood as curiosity-driven experimental or theoretical work undertaken to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundations of phenomena and observable facts.

Eligible Project

• The project must involve collaboration with researchers who either directly contribute to the communication or quality-assure the finished production prior to launch. Responsibility for ensuring this lies with the project leader. The researchers involved must as a minimum have a PhD and at the time of the application be affiliated to a Danish or foreign research institution.

Eligible Expenses

• Salary expenses and costs associated with the production of communication content
• Researcher fees
• Costs associated with the development of communication platforms
• Costs associated with the communication and distribution of the project, including making the project accessible free of charge on payment platforms
• Costs associated with auditor’s certification of accounts

Ineligible Expenses

• Projects with an applied scientific focus or clinical health-scientific research
• Projects with focus on educational recruitment
• Projects focused on media training of as well as coaching and teaching communication to researchers
• Purely commercial purposes
• Teaching materials
• Information campaigns
• Hosting or participating in conferences and courses
• Citizen Science projects
• Salary for researchers

Eligibility Criteria

• Science Communication can be applied for by independent communicators, public institutions, private companies, or non-profit organizations in Denmark, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands.
• At the time of application, the applicant and/or institution, etc. must have communication as their main occupation and documented professional experience in journalism, media production or another form of communication.
• Private companies may apply for funding for non-commercial projects with a non-profit aim.

Audiences 

• The project must be aimed at non-scientific audiences primarily in Denmark: the wider population, from young people who have completed lower-secondary education and upwards.
• The project’s principal communication must be accessible to all interested parties free of charge such as subscriptions, paywalls or entrance fees. Distribution via libraries, including book loans, eReolen (digital books) and Filmstriben (digital films), is regarded as a supplement to the requirement for free access.
• The communication must be freely accessible from the time it is published.
• The communication may be in Danish or a foreign language, but it must be linguistically accessible to a broad audience in Denmark.

For more information, visit Carlsberg Foundation.