Science Cafés, Science Shops and the Lockdown Experience in Florence and Rome^†

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript described the Science cafés, science shops, and their implements during the Covid-19 lockdown. My comments regarding this paper are below:

The main comment about this paper is: the authors claimed in the abstract, the Science cafés & science shops are responded to the needs of "a direct contact, not relying on mass-media communication", but in the paper, I can not get the points about how does Science cafés & science shops respond on the "direct contact" needs behind in this on-line methodology. 

The second point, online Science cafés & science shops is a communication method based on virtual communication tools. How its essence is different from other online communication methods. How does it affect the network and real ecology of the scientific community?

The last point is What is the difference between the online and in-person Science cafés & science shops in terms of their effects?

Author Response

We thank the reviews for his/her careful reading and valuable suggestions.

This manuscript described the Science cafés, science shops, and their implements during the Covid-19 lockdown. My comments regarding this paper are below:

The main comment about this paper is: the authors claimed in the abstract, the Science cafés & science shops are responded to the needs of "a direct contact, not relying on mass-media communication", but in the paper, I can not get the points about how does Science cafés & science shops respond on the "direct contact" needs behind in this on-line methodology.

We added a paragraph in the Introduction (lines 63-69) describing how the requests from experts and public arrived, which is further detailed in Section 4.

We also added a line (238) specifying that the chat interactions are still visible on the YouTube and FaceBook sites.

The second point, online Science cafés & science shops is a communication method based on virtual communication tools. How its essence is different from other online communication methods.

We added a paragraph (lines 270-272) describing the difference between science cafés and other online sommunication methods, essentially the focus on questions from participants to experts.

How does it affect the network and real ecology of the scientific community?

We added a paragraph (lines 273-276) about the "educative" role of science cafés for the scientific community.

The last point is What is the difference between the online and in-person Science cafés & science shops in terms of their effects?

We did not explore the "effects", since it takes time to have them "revealed", we should probably resort to qualitative interviews to participants to put into evidence the possible role of science cafes in changing their opinion. This will be a subject of a future investigation. 

Reviewer 2 Report

This article discusses critically the experience of two Science Cafés during the COVID19 related lockdown in Italy, discussing reasons and numbers of a successful experience to efficiently communicate information to the citizenship and to limit the spread of false information in the population.

This article is interesting and deserves to be published in Future Internet with minor changes.

The first and the most important change concerns the need to review the English language  of the document, somewhat limited and prone to imprecisions and errors.  I hereby report some but invite the authors to a comprehensive review:

• Line 28. Not all encounters were forbidden in Italy, but mainly the “in-person encounters”.
• Line 65. “Furnishing” is probably “providing”.
• Line 76: a ! instead of a full stop.
• Line 84: “previous” should be “former”
• Line 133: “from the moment that in Italy” should probably be “since in Italy”
• Line 138: “financing quotes” should probably be “quota (or level) of public funding”.
• Line 154: Italy is a state, not a region.
• Line 179: defining information “schizophrenic” is not scholarly. Please rephrase.
• Line 206: CV-19 has never be defined in that way, nor there is a need to do so.
• Line 2015: an —> one

Here are some other improvements that would make the paper better:

Line 60: the authors claim that the community asked for discussions on COVID-19, but give no account on how such requests were made and how they assessed the relative importance of having such discussion loci for the community of reference.

Line 256: the authors claim a “big [large] participation of students ”. how big? Do the authors have any state with reference to the school population to sustain this claim?

Section 6: Authors did a survey of approval from the public. It would be interesting - if at all possible - to study what is the correlation, if any, between age and satisfaction with the online version of the encounters?

Author Response

We thank the reviews for his/her careful reading and valuable suggestions.

The first and the most important change concerns the need to review the English language  of the document, somewhat limited and prone to imprecisions and errors.  I hereby report some but invite the authors to a comprehensive review:

• Line 28. Not all encounters were forbidden in Italy, but mainly the “in-person encounters”.
• Line 65. “Furnishing” is probably “providing”.
• Line 76: a ! instead of a full stop.
• Line 84: “previous” should be “former”
• Line 133: “from the moment that in Italy” should probably be “since in Italy”
• Line 138: “financing quotes” should probably be “quota (or level) of public funding”.
• Line 154: Italy is a state, not a region.
• Line 179: defining information “schizophrenic” is not scholarly. Please rephrase.
• Line 206: CV-19 has never be defined in that way, nor there is a need to do so.
• Line 2015: an —> one

Done

Here are some other improvements that would make the paper better:

Line 60: the authors claim that the community asked for discussions on COVID-19, but give no account on how such requests were made and how they assessed the relative importance of having such discussion loci for the community of reference.

We inserted how the requests arrived to the Associations

Line 256: the authors claim a “big [large] participation of students ”. how big? Do the authors have any state with reference to the school population to sustain this claim?

We added the participation numbers from YouTube analytics and the video chat

Section 6: Authors did a survey of approval from the public. It would be interesting - if at all possible - to study what is the correlation, if any, between age and satisfaction with the online version of the encounters?

We added a table (3) showing that young people have a slight larger preference towards online events.

Reviewer 3 Report

I wonder if the abstract could be a bit more informative if the Authors state at least in one sentence : "Here we describe..." or "Our aim here is..." Now it seems just a part of the text. This is just a suggestion.

Minor points:

line 89: heathy > health

line 124: restituted > presented

line 132: sentence unfinished

line 152: [23] > [23].

line 219: "3000 other" - is it consistent with Fig 5?

line 261: have to > has to

References: please check

[4] A. (.d'  > A. d'

[5] Lorini, D. > D. Lorini

[8] and e. al  > et al

[18], [22] names of some authors in initials only

[24] should be A. Mian and S. Khan

The subject is important and interesting. The text is informative and clear. Once minor misprints listed above are corrected, it can be published as it is.

Author Response

We thank the reviews for his/her careful reading and valuable suggestions.

Iwonder if the abstract could be a bit more informative if the Authors state at least in one sentence : "Here we describe..." or "Our aim here is..." Now it seems just a part of the text. This is just a suggestion.

We rephrased the abstract according with this suggestion

Minor points:

line 89: heathy > health

line 124: restituted > presented

line 132: sentence unfinished

line 152: [23] > [23].

done

line 219: "3000 other" - is it consistent with Fig 5?

We added a line in the caption of the figure stating that The 4.5K peak on March, 31st includes the more that 1000 synchronous views and the about 3.0K views immediately after the conclusion. 

line 261: have to > has to

References: please check

[4] A. (.d' > A. d'

[5] Lorini, D. > D. Lorini

[8] and e. al > et al

[18], [22] names of some authors in initials only

[24] should be A. Mian and S. Khan

done

The subject is important and interesting. The text is informative and clear. Once minor misprints listed above are corrected, it can be published as it is.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript has been significantly improved and now warrants publication in Future Internet.