A new service called STM Digest will focus on highlighting Elsevier's published research and exposing it to the broader research community and the general public in a digestible format. It was created by Elsevier Publishers Deirdre Dunne and Donna de Weerd-Wison. Here, they write about the initiative and how early career researchers can become involved.

Update: We're looking for early career researchers who are interested in joining STM Digest as Research Ambassadors. If you are an active early career researcher, you can apply here .

The STM Digest pilot will highlight articles in Elsevier's Environmental & Ecology and Economics & Finance journals and will likely expand to include other portfolios in 2015.

As more and more connections are made between scientific disciplines, researchers increasingly find themselves reaching beyond their own subject area for information. What's more, as economics, the environment, healthcare and other scientific topics dominate the news, people with little or no scientific training are compelled to seek out original research but are often unable to understand and interpret it clearly.

This reality has sparked the creation of a new kind of publication at Elsevier. STM Digest will be a collection of layman translations/summaries of original research papers with societal impact or policy focus. These lay summaries have the potential to make research more accessible, improve engagement in science, and benefit wider society. The articles will be published online and next to the original article on ScienceDirect and will be freely available. STM Digest will begin by highlighting relevant articles in Elsevier's Environmental & Ecology and Economics & Finance journals and will likely expand to include other portfolios in 2015.

"Translation of research towards policy and science users is a vital part of growing impact, and STM Digest supports this in an interesting and accessible way," said Dr. Ruth Alcock, Editor-in-Chief of Environment International.

How STM Digest works

The initiative is a collaboration between Elsevier's STM Journals group and Mendeley. We will continue to expand our journal networks by signing up interested early career researchers who, under the title of Research Ambassador, will write lay summaries of recently accepted journal articles with the approval of the original author.

The first lay summaries are already online:

The Mendeley STM Digest Group will form the meeting place where authors, early career researchers and members of different research communities can be introduced and discuss their (interdisciplinary) research, initially via the easier-to-understand lay summaries and later utilizing these new relationships to improve their research in its formative stage. The summaries will be shared with a wider audience via Mendeley's social media sharing facility. In addition, articles that are not open access will be freely available for three months, and authors are encouraged to share a link to their article via email and social networks.

Jessica Reeves, Head of User Enagagment for Mendeley, said the initiative ties in with Mendeley's aim to "build an engaged community of researchers."

By creating the STM Digest group, we hope to encourage interesting discussions, collaborations and visibility of key issues affecting society through the lay translations shared in this group. Fostering deeper connections amongst researchers and the general public is key to improving engagement with science by making it more accessible.

What is a Research Ambassador?

Research Ambassadors are early career researchers who will work closely with the publisher and editors of specific Elsevier journals in their area of expertise to monitor accepted papers each month and select the most relevant papers with a policy and/or societal impact focus.