Month after month the Spokes magazine brings intellectual nurture and best practice to the science engagement community. The magazine is only as good as you make it, dear science engagement peers. Is it finally time for you to write an article?

Are you sitting on a body of knowledge or experience that you would feel ready to write up? Do you want to shake your peers or challenge them? Are you a small group of practitioners and/or researchers who'd like to contribute a case study?

Next January the Spokes Editorial Committee will be meeting up to put together our yearly editorial schedule - now is the right time to submit a short pitch about your idea by filling in this simple form by 1 December 2019. We commit to reading all ideas and sending feedback about each one.

We're also collecting readers' suggestions on what they'd like to read next - see details here.

What makes a good Spokes article?

Extracts from our guide for contributors:

Great Spokes articles include one or more of these ingredients:

• Edgy topic, recent trend in science engagement
• Idea or practice from neighbouring field that will inspire the science engagement community to see issues from a different angle or try new ways of working
• Articles in the following field, for which we have recurring gaps in Spokes: marketing, operations, HR, digital media
• Case studies drawn from a diversity of organisations and countries
• Academic papers re-worked by their authors into a more informal format

What won’t work

• Articles based drawn from a single organisation or project, unless absolutely outstanding
• Sales pitches
• Topics we’ve already published articles about recently (check all issues here and thematic bundles of articles called Spokes collections here)

What types of articles do you find in Spokes?

Spokes combines in-depth articles and interviews with news from the Ecsite office and events, the latest from EU science policy, announcement from members, good reads and opportunities… Targeted at busy professionals, its ambition is to be both informative and entertaining. Spokes doesn’t use peer review, but an Editorial Committee selects article proposals and works with authors to ensure that articles present high quality information in an engaging way.

Each Spokes issue’s main page gets an average of 800 unique page views.

• Usual Spokes structure One ‘IN DEPTH’ article – see example here
• And/or one ‘LOOKOUT’ article (3-5 interviews) – see example here
• And/or one ‘PORTFOLIO’ (a sort of slideshow) – see example here
• A ‘COLUMN’, written by Ecsite representatives or guests – see example here
• Half a dozen news sections, presenting summaries of hyperlinked items published on the Ecsite website (news, good reads, opportunities etc)

We are calling for In Depth, Lookout and Portfolio ideas (columns we manage ourselves).

[The picture above is taken from an article in Spokes #52© Anniina Nissinen]