The crisis in popularization of science which began after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the fact that its infrastructure was almost destroyed – educational societies, popular science books, TV shows and magazines were no longer existed, the media almost did not write or speak about science. Unlike Russia, the practice of telling the public about the research results abroad has existed for more than three decades. This requires special knowledge and skills, so since the late 1980s in of Europe and the USA there has been an opportunity to get education in “scientific communication”. In our country, scientific communication and specialists engaged in professional promotion of science in the society appeared only in 2014 when the concept of “scientific communicator” emerged in the Russian media and problems of promoting scientific knowledge began to be developed. The purpose of the article is to consider the prospects of scientific communication development in the meaning of interaction of science and society and promotion of scientific knowledge. The paper presents an overview of experience of scientific communication in the international community and in Russia. The author attempts to determine and justify the possibility of referring scientific communication to a separate academic discipline. A set of criteria for selecting academic disciplines is chosen and compliance of the field of scientific communication with these criteria in the international community and in Russia is presented. It is concluded that scientific communication in the era of open society is an important and necessary component of further development of science. The results can be used for further research in this area in order to create an effective system of scientific communication in Russia
Keywords
mass media, scientific communication, internal and external communication, popularization of science, scientific communicator, academic discipline, global trend