Glossy Magazines Play Key Role In Promoting An Institution's Research

Institution's Research COLLABORATION: A feature on her work helped Anne Cress get help of others. With color photographs, glossy paper, snazzy graphics, and snappy copy, the annual and periodic magazines, newsletters, and reports published by United States research institutions are the obvious products of considerable money, time, and effort. But they are more than just pretty faces, according to the editors who put them together and the researchers featured in their pages. Take, for example, a new piece being published by the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research, which recently named a 100-member Board of Associates to seek out potential donors and solicit contributions. With the group meeting just once a year, Whitehead staff had to find a way to keep board members informed of happenings and research at the Cambridge, Mass., facility. Thus was born Discovery, a three-times-a-year newsletter filled with profiles and articles about the work being done at Whitehead. The first issue was published in January. "This is specifically designed to communicate the research that goes on at the institute to lay audiences," says Seema Kumar, the publication's editor and Whitehead's associate director of public affairs. Courtesy UMass Medical Center Courtesy Penn State Courtesy Ohio State A note at the top of Discovery's front page calls it "a publication for the Whitehead Board of Associates." Kumar points out that it is sent also to the media and to Whitehead administrative personnel who may not be aware of the research being done there. NEW: Semma Kumar introduced Discovery The Whitehead Institute is not alone. From newsletters to full-fledged, four-color magazines, universities and research institutions are publishing a wide variety of materials meant to highlight and promote the work their scientists are doing. Circulations can range from less than 1,000 for Whitehead periodicals to the 70,000 copies of Research that Arizona State University publishes. Then there are annual reports: In addition to the usual yearly review of finances and donors, most devote a generous amount of space to current news about the institution's research. Scientists call these nontechnical, nonscientific materials a good way to disseminate news of their work, which can lead to the added benefit of unearthing potential research collaborators. For their part, editors say their publications and annual reports are a part of an institution's overall effort to get its message out. The goals are generally outreach-oriented: to make people aware of what the university or research center considers its good work, frequently in the hopes that such awareness will translate into donations. "I see the goals to raise awareness, facilitate understanding, and generate support and goodwill for the institution," says Susan D. Veshi, director of publications at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester and managing editor of its annual report. "Those are largely intangible, but we like to think the publications increase the understanding of this institution." Pressed for specifics, Veshi answers: "If you're asking, 'Do we bring in x number of patients or x number of dollars?', I can't say. It contributes to the overall awareness campaign that we generate in this office. It's all part of a plan." The researchers themselves-scientists whose work the publications profile-generally support the use of such pieces. They note that annual reports and research magazines help them keep tabs on what their colleagues are doing, which can lead to rewarding collaborations. Anne E. Cress is an associate professor of radiation oncology at the Arizona Cancer Center, an arm of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center. She has examined the surfaces of tumor cells to determine why some forms of prostate cancer are latent while others are aggressive. An article on that research was included in the cancer center's annual report for 1994-95. "A colleague of mine in optical sciences read about my work and approached me and said, 'Maybe we could apply an optical-science approach to your research,'" Cress recalls. "That initiated some [National Science Foundation] grants, some collaborative things. Ordinarily he wouldn't read about biology outside of Science or Nature." Steven D'Ambrosio, a professor of radiology and pharmacology at the Ohio State University, agrees. His work on DNA repair systems was profiled in the Winter 1996 issue of Frontiers, a magazine published three times a year by the school's Office of University Communications and its Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Research Institute. "Once in a while you get feedback from a scientist, and you get some collaboration and some other information" after an article appears, D'Ambrosio states. "There's not a good way across the community to tell everybody what you're doing, and this provides a quick, easy way." CHECKING UP: Philippa C. Marrack Philippa C. Marrack, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator working at the National Jewish Center for Immunology and Respiratory Medicine in Denver, calls the publications a useful, effective means "to find out information" and "to check up on a particular individual," but not to kill time. "I usually get them because I'm going to visit an institution to give a talk, and they send them to me so I can figure out who I'm going to talk to," she adds. "But I never use them to skim through [just] because I have nothing to do." While gaining the benefits of colleagues' insights is perhaps a purer scientific goal, researchers also point out the importance of informing the public of their work in a nontechnical, easy-to-read way. "The work I do is in prostate cancer, and a lot of people are really not willing to talk about it very much or learn about it very much because of the fear factor," says Cress of the Arizona Cancer Center. "It helps to educate the public in a nonthreatening way. I get a lot of calls from people that want to know more information, and I've been able to mail out pamphlets and things that I think would help them." John C. Reed, the scientific director of the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, Calif., was featured, along with the research center's other scientists, in its handsome 1994 annual report. Formerly the La Jolla Cancer Research Foundation (Notebook, The Scientist, April 1, 1996, page 30), the Burnham Institute makes a point of using its annual report to describe the research, publications, and team members of all of its staff scientists. "It . . . is helpful for recruiting students to come work in labs. They can look through there and get a feel for what sort of projects are going on," Reed observes. "We also have it as something we can show the lay public. Mostly, [administrators] use it as a fund-raising tool-you're trying to educate potential donors about the institution." Is it successful? "I think it's a useful tool for those things," Reed contends. Cress points out that in addition to soliciting more significant donations for the institution, annual reports can help younger researchers attract smaller grants for "interim support . . . to follow promising leads." She says that with money hard to come by, only more-established scientists with larger funding bases can afford to pursue new angles. "Currently there is no funding mechanism nationally to follow up promising leads. . . . I can see where it really stifles younger people," Cress notes. "[The National Institutes of Health], NSF, any of those places, it's so competitive now. Even some of the private foundations like the American Cancer Society won't go after [a new lead] unless a tremendous amount of work has been done on it already. I think the newsletters do help. I've had people call me and say, 'We really are interested, and we want to make sure this [money] goes directly to you.'" While private institutions use their publications to recruit private donors, government-funded researchers need to show their donors-the taxpaying public-that their money is well spent. The Marine Communications Office at the University of Delaware is probably one of the U.S.'s more active communications departments. It produces newsletters, annual reports, brochures, technical reports, videos, and radio and television public service announcements for Delaware's Graduate College of Marine Studies and its federally funded Sea Grant College Program. "We have a real commitment to serving the public and disseminating this information to them," comments marine outreach coordinator Tracey L. Bryant. "After all, it's the public's dollars that support most of the research work, and we feel they deserve to know how these dollars are being spent. We feel people need to be educated about the marine environment, about the coastal environment. The more they know, the more they'll be willing to support that kind of research in the future." Pennsylvania State University publishes its glossy, 32-page Research/Penn State four times a year. Editor Nancy Marie Brown calls the magazine "a subtle recruiting tool and a subtle development tool." "We're trying to show Pennsylvania residents where their money is going for state-funded research," she says. "We're trying to encourage their interest in research so they will continue supporting it through their congressmen and the federal government. We also use it to create an image of Penn State as an interesting place where interesting things are happening, so that when parents and students are choosing a college, they might consider Penn State." While the professionalism of the publications can help make them more accessible to a general audience, it can have an adverse effect among a scientist's peers. According to researchers, occasionally the pieces look a little too good, leading to charges of exaggerated importance. "Some of my colleagues get turned off," Cress acknowledges. "They look at it and say, 'You're really overblowing what you're doing.' So your credibility may suffer. The way I've been trying to get around that is to make sure the people you work with who write these articles don't change them too much and make the work more revolutionary than it is." The question of reputation and self-promotion can even affect editors' decisions about what to publish. For example, while Research/Penn State's Brown sometimes will seek out a scientist whose work was publicized internally or reached her through word of mouth, she is most comfortable pursuing stories recommended by the school's deans. "Faculty sometimes contact us directly, but that's the least common route," Brown maintains. "When they do contact us directly, it makes us look twice at that project, because in many of the departments, seeking out publicity is seen as something negative. You're not supposed to blow your own horn, you're supposed to let someone else do it." RECOGNITION: OSU's Earle Holland favors dialogue. According to Earle Holland, associate executive director of Ohio State's university communications office and the editor of Frontiers, if that resistance to publicity can be overcome, scientists can be valuable tools in promoting their institutions. "The recognition of the cancer program here and the James Cancer Hospital has been growing by leaps and bounds, but I'm not going to say Frontiers is the major cause of that," Holland remarks. "However, the faculty researchers that are involved, when they see the presentation of their work and their colleagues' work, become less hesitant about entering into the communications process and the dialogue outside their own peers."

Glossy Magazines Play Key Role In Promoting An Institution's Research

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