The Consortium is currently open to any graduate student, post-doctoral fellow, lecturer, faculty or professional actively working on research in a STEM field. If you’re an administrator, communicator scicomm researcher, trainer, media professional or policymaker interested in joining, please get in touch for an invitation.

Massive is committed to creating a diverse, inclusive and friendly community. All members are required to sign on to and abide by a general code of conduct, a scientific code of conduct, and guidelines designed to lead to humane, constructive, and equitable interactions with other members.

• Practical, online, interactive training in the Massive Method of telling science stories
• Certificate in narrative science storytelling training upon the completion of your first 2 stories, as defined in our editorial process documentation
• Access to our members-only discussion forum
• Access to our members-only pitch forums to hone and shape story ideas for consideration on MassiveSci.com and other partner publications
• Access to our members-only scicomm, media and career resources library
• Access to audience feedback metrics on MassiveSci.com articles
• Invitations to members-only meet-ups, newsletters, office hours and Q&As with expert guests
• Opportunities to participate in exclusive scicomm and science media opportunities
• Request resume review, recommendations, and other career-oriented feedback from Massive staff and community
• Anything else you want to see? Let us know.

You said that active researchers can join but I’m not sure I qualify. I was recently doing research but changed careers, or I did research in the past. Can I still join? 🤔

Yes! If you’re ever in doubt, send us an email and we can discuss!

I’m a social scientist! Why can’t I join? 😢

At the moment, we’re only working with STEM researchers because narrativizing is not a big part of how quantitative sciences are taught or practiced. For reasons we are happy to discuss (or debate!) you can’t join if you’re a sociologist, cultural anthropologist, economist, lawyer or historian. That said, there are some fuzzy areas in psychology/cognitive sciences. If you’re ever in doubt, send us an email and we can discuss!

Are you actively trying to support underrepresented voices and identities in STEM? ❤️

Yes. We want to give underrepresented groups in STEM fields and in scicomm a bigger platform for reaching wider audiences. We aim to be as inclusive and welcoming as possible because we know it’s hard to simply work as a researcher in spaces where you are alone in your identity. We think it is important to have different types of people representing science to the public so that younger people see that they too can be a part of STEM, and that they can have agency in STEM fields.  If you are a part of a group or organization that promotes inclusivity or diversity in any way, please get in touch with us directly so we can help promote your work and bring you into our community in a way that helps you. 

What kind of people are in the consortium? 👥

We have a number of different kinds of folks in our consortium, or active in our online forum. Most members are active academic STEM researchers (grad students, post-docs, PIs, faculty of all kinds, lecturers), STEM researchers in non-academic contexts (government, private, corporate), or recent STEM researchers who are transitioning to scicomm careers in different contexts. We also have scicomm researchers in our forum who we actively collaborate with to understand how our training and editorial frameworks impact our audiences. We’ll increasingly share and integrate this research with members as we grow and learn. We also have science communicators who we invite into the consortium from educational spaces, radio, podcasts, journalism, TV and media of all kinds. 

What is certification? 📜

If you want to be certified with Massive, you will need to get two pitches accepted to be published. This can be hard, but most people manage to do it in 8-12 weeks. Remember, after we accept a pitch, you go through a collaborative, transparent edit process with our editorial team to whip your pitch into an accessible article. Certification denotes that you have successfully mastered story pitching and writing a science narrative to the extent that you are published on MassiveSci.com, a publication with exacting editorial standards.  

Do you pay me for articles I publish with Massive?💰

Yes, after certification! We pay you on a per-article basis for articles you pitch that we accept and publish after you are certified (i.e. after you publish your first two articles with us). When you join, we explain this process and rates in more depth. 

What IS the consortium, exactly? 💥

In short, the consortium is many things! The consortium is a conduit to Massive, the accessible digital science publication. You can pitch us your stories and if accepted, we help you write them and publish them to a wide audience of science curious readers. The consortium is  also an amazing community of like-minded researchers from a vast array of STEM fields. It’s also a personal resource for your career development and a huge resource for impactful science storytelling. For full member benefits, see above!

What can I do as a consortium member? ✍️ 🧠 🤝

Great question. There’s a spectrum from passive→active and we don’t discriminate! If you want to learn by simply hanging out in our forum and reading other people’s articles, pitches, posts and commentary, you’re welcome to. If you’re not interested in writings stories, you can simply write peer commentary on other folks’ Massive articles. You can pitch us other story formats and ideas too! You can meet other researchers in or out of your field. Many members have met IRL to talk scicomm and science. You can meet and engage with scicomm researchers and communicators from all walks of life. You can take advantage of our editorial and media expertise in a number of ways. For full member benefits, see above!

Where does the consortium live? 🌐

The consortium lives online (as does our digital-only publication Massive). You can join from anywhere. Currently, because Massive staff are US-based, many of our members are based in North America. But we have over 30 countries represented in the consortium and are hoping to build an international community of STEM storytellers. Most consortium activities (pitching, peer commentary, events, training output, etc.) live on our forum, which you’ll gain access to once you join.

You're a for-profit company. Why? 🏛️

We chose to be for-profit and to take private funding for a couple of reasons. To succeed in our mission of giving everyone better access to science and scientific thinking, we need to reach as many people as possible. We believe success is more likely in a for-profit context because the business models available to us rely on assembling a large audience. Non-profit contexts make it more difficult to reach wide audiences because funding is dependent on grants and donations from small groups of individuals, which non-profit organizations often end up focusing on instead of their audience. Our investors have no editorial control whatsoever — but they are interested in learning from us how to tell stories about science and distribute them to the public so they can market themselves as innovators to partners, customers, investors and potential employees. Encouraging companies to use more of their marketing budgets to get the public excited about science in productive ways furthers our mission on a scale we’d be unlikely to achieve alone. We are committed to transparency about our investors, incentives, goals and business practices, as well as our policies around intellectual property, licensing and collaboration with scientists and other organizations.

If you still have questions that aren’t answered here, please email us!