Peter Green Managing Director of AlphaGalileo Foundation, the world’s independent research news service for the media, and a Summit sponsor writes on the importance of reaching international media to promote Australia as well as your research organisation

International awareness of research excellence underpins wealth creation. The best students from around the world clamour to study at top universities. Multinational research teams always want collaborators from leading institutions. Citation rankings and league tables are important but so is basic public relations to ensure that your university or institute features in the media seen around the world by international investors and potential students.

Getting relevant and timely news to the domestic media, and having researchers who can talk compellingly about the significance and excitement of their work is an every day part of all university press office’s duties, but now an international audience can be added to the communications skill set. Major global media and key freelances around the world can be reached by a few keystrokes, at the same time as you reach a domestic audience. It only needs for research communities to raise their eyes to a global horizon.

AlphaGalileo was created 15 years ago by two of the UK’s research councils to ensure that European research in the sciences, humanities, medicine, social science and technology received more and better coverage in the media. The Service has been so successful that as well as European universities, institutes and peer–reviewed journals that use the Service we now also have US, Canadian and Japanese news providers. They all benefit from a small moderated audience of journalists who have asked to receive news from our Service. Other Internet-based operations offer access to far larger email lists, but these lack the advantage of being a receptive media audience that wants to receive news from a trusted source.

AlphaGalileo is not an electronic newspaper. We do not rewrite content. Instead the media gets news, moderated against our posting policy, almost as soon as it arrives with our News Team. News can be provided under embargo and only seen by the vetted journalists registered with us. Content can have PDFs, videos and images attached. Experts’ contact detail can be provided in the confidence that only the media have access to mobile phone numbers and personal email addresses. We offer several different annual subscription options, all of which allow for an unlimited number of news items to be distributed via the Service and any number of PR staff to be registered. Or you can pay per single item posted.

AlphaGalileo would welcome Australian news alongside that from the University of California, Harvard School of Engineering, Mayo Clinic, University of Montreal, Cambridge University, Imperial College, Elsevier, Routledge, CERN, Max-Planck, Karolinska Institute and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. But as importantly we would welcome an opportunity to learn more about the culture of Australian science communication so that we can adjust our operation to deliver news of Australian research excellence to the media. As the world’s independent research news service we aim to listen and adapt so that we can deliver the best and most relevant service possible. Our philosophy has worked for 15 years, we now look forward to bringing that service to Australia.

Peter Green

www.alphagalileo.org

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