Generating nearly 100 articles of media coverage, our media campaigns for EOSC communicated research, policy, and innovation insights by leveraging human storytelling. Our work highlighted the benefits of open science by promoting reduced duplication in collecting, creating and processing scientific data as well as putting petabytes of complex and FAIR information in the hands of small research teams that may have previously been unable to gain access to such material. Matter PR secured news coverage for the pan-European research infrastructure in tier-1 media, such as the Financial Times, Science Business, and The Parliament Magazine. While the Science Cloud is still only in its beta phase and not fully operational, our strategy focused each campaign on what the funding (or entities that make up the future EOSC) will do for end-users, such as helping researchers access open, robust data, or developing healthcare services. Reaching popular websites within the scientific, policy and innovation news sectors, Matter PR reached a possible audience of around 94 million unique monthly visitors, of which an estimated readership of 9 million individuals worldwide have engaged with this content. Putting this coverage into context with advertising rates upon the platforms that have covered each campaign, Matter PR’s Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) – or what it would have cost to secure this content by paid advertising – is over €246K for the entire campaign. In early 2020, the arrival of the pandemic showcased the very essence of what the Open Science Cloud had been built for: helping researchers collaborate quicker, faster and more efficiently to solve society’s greatest challenges. We were able to capitalise on the technologies and research efforts funded and supported by EOSC that were helping to tackle the deadly virus. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a big challenge for researchers has been sharing data and findings in a coordinated way. Although researchers were already sharing free resources to tackle COVID-19 in the context of the European Open Science Cloud initiative (EOSC), the Matter PR team crafted a campaign to highlight that 73,000 scientists began to work beyond paywalls, coming together to develop a vaccine for the virus. Gathering clinical information, the data portal brought together relevant datasets that were extremely difficult to find, such as raw and assembled viral sequences. Set up by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the European research infrastructure ELIXIR, the platform supported life science laboratories across Europe to share and store their research data. Our campaigns to promote the open science platform have been the sector’s most successful global PR campaign ever. Senior Project Manager at Trust-IT Services Nick Ferguson said: “Trust-IT is involved in the definition, coordination and implementation of an impactful stakeholder engagement and communication strategy across the EOSC and all its target stakeholders. Matter PR elevated our existing communication and dissemination efforts to heights we never thought possible. The team’s bespoke media campaigns helped us communicate complex research and policy with simple human storytelling, something that is not as easy as it sounds!”
In 2022, we completed a two-year global media relations campaign for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The Matter PR team disseminated a mixture of use cases and latest news items from the research powerhouse, which is collaborating with some of the world’s leading universities and technical facilities.