Introduction
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), an agency of the European Union, delivers independent and transparent scientific advice to stakeholders within the food chain ‘to protect European consumers from food related risks.’ A key element of EFSA’s mission is to promote coherence in EU risk communication. All EFSA scientific outputs are published open access in the EFSA Journal.
Following a successful tender process, in early 2023, SciencePOD began working with the EFSA Journal to turn selected EFSA scientific reports and opinions into Plain Language Summaries (PLS). The goal is to make EFSA scientific outputs and advice accessible for informed non-technical audiences. PLS are an effective tool to communicate the significance of scientific research evidence to wide audiences in clear, jargon-free language. The PLS are available on the EFSA Journal Wiley Online Library and on the EFSA website.
Challenge
The EFSA Journal team wanted to communicate key messages in EFSA research clearly, concisely and in a timely manner to a wider and sometimes non-technical audience. This was a challenging objective as the scientific opinions and reports published in EFSA Journal are comprehensive outputs. They include detailed scientific and technical data and information as well as multiple appendices. A scientific opinion or report published in EFSA Journal can run over 150 pages and include 50,000 to 100,000 words.
Moreover, the target stakeholders and audiences for these publications are varied. They include:
- Risk managers and policy makers
- Academia and scientific community
- Farmers and primary producers
- Distributors and organisations involved in preparing, distribution and serving food such as wholesalers, retailers, hotels, restaurants and caterers (HORECA)
- Non-governmental groups and advocacy groups, including media
- Consumer organisations and the public
With this in mind, the EFSA Journal team concluded that Plain Language Summaries (PLS) are an appropriate and effective communications approach to achieve objectives and serve the needs of varied audiences. To create the PLS, EFSA needed a partner specialised in the creation of clear, concise and engaging content who also had the capability to produce the PLS for publication simultaneously with the scientific opinions or reports. Importantly, this partner also had to demonstrate the necessary subject matter expertise to handle a variety of topics and complex, in-depth scientific data and information.