Please see the About Knowledge4Policy page.

At the bottom of every page in K4P you’ll find a simple Yes/No question: “Was this page useful?”, while each page’s footer features a “Give us feedback” link.

Feedback concerning a specific page.

• If there is a problem with the page, you can answer the “Was this page useful?” question with a “No” and then fill out the feedback form to tell us why and how it could be improved.
• Alternatively, just click on the “Give us feedback” link in the footer to open the same feedback form.

Feedback or question concerning Knowledge4Policy as a whole.

• Use the feedback form.

In all cases:  

• the team responsible for that page will get your feedback;
• you can opt to provide your email address so they can get in touch.
• to reduce spam, we have had to limit the use of the feedback form: you can only use one feedback form once every period.

K4P hosts many enewsletters, each managed by a different knowledge service.  

Currently, you can subscribe to them by:

• going to the knowledge service’s landing page and clicking on the “Subscribe to our newsletter” link (if there is no such link, that knowledge service doesn’t publish an enewsletter);
• providing your email address*.

You will be able to (un)subscribe from any enewsletter from any edition.

(*) Note: In the future, you’ll also be able to manage all your subscriptions via a one stop shop inside your user menu, as long as you use the same email address for your newsletters as your K4P account. See FAQ: What is a K4P account, how do I create one and how do I use it?

Please see our accessibility statement.

It is not possible for any one team to organise the world’s scientific knowledge in a domain and synthesise it for policymakers. 

In 2021 we therefore began working on the first of a series of community features to allow users to:

• contribute scientific knowledge;
• comment on the knowledge they find here;
• stay up to date via subscribing to newsletters and following conversations;
• ask questions to scientific experts;
• collaborate on evidence-informed policymaking.

The following features are currently available:

• Create a K4P account – see FAQ: What is a K4P account and how do I create one?
• Create and manage your personal profile (required before you can contribute anything to Knowledge4Policy) – see FAQ: What is my personal profile and how do I create and manage mine?
• Contact me: allows members to message each other without sharing their email address (both users must opt in) – see FAQ: What is ‘Contact me’ and how does it work?
• Ask a scientist: submit a (private) question to an EC community manager – see FAQ: What is ‘Ask a scientist’, and how does it work?
• Contribute knowledge to a knowledge service – see FAQ: How do I contribute to Knowledge4Policy?
• Comment on blog posts and Follow the conversations
• Subscribe to newsletters

Details on these features are provided below.  

Future developments will include:

• (un)Subscribe to all K4P newsletters from a one stop shop;
• Comment on other forms of knowledge.
• Create and manage profiles of your organisation and/or projects;
• Join closed working groups to collaborate with other members in a private space.

There is one K4P community: each member of Knowledge4Policy has one K4P account and one K4P personal profile (see FAQ: What is my personal profile and how do I create and manage mine?). All personal profiles appear in the All members gallery in the top K4P menu.

On the other hand, we often refer to knowledge service communities. Each of them:

• is managed by a knowledge service (although many knowledge services currently do not have a knowledge community);
• brings together a subset of the K4P community interested in that knowledge service’s specific domain.

As a K4P member you can apply to join one, several or all knowledge service communities. When your application is approved by the knowledge service you:

• appear in their members gallery;
• can submit knowledge to the knowledge service (see FAQ: How do I contribute to Knowledge4Policy?);
• can contact other members of the K4P community via the (see FAQ: What is ‘Contact me’ and how does it work?).

Each knowledge service on K4P has one or more community managers. They are scientists, working in multidisciplinary teams within the EU Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

In addition to their scientific work, they are responsible for managing their knowledge service’s presence on K4P.

What is it? A K4P account allows you to login to K4P to access its interactive features, ranging from ‘Ask a scientist’ through to joining working groups (see What is the K4P Community).

How do I create my K4P account? Like all accounts on the European Commission’s websites, K4P accounts use the EU Login authentication system. To create a K4P account is simple.

1. Click “Login” icon in the top of the page (next to the EC logo) or on any “Login/Register” button available wherever an interactive service is proposed, and provide your consent. They all send you to the EU Login page.
2. Login if you have an EU Login account. If not, click “Create an account” and follow the instructions.

Now that I have an account, how do I log in?

1. Login using the “Login” link at the top of the page (next to the EC logo) or from any “Login/Register” button, as above.
2. Once logged in, you are automatically returned to the page you started. The login icon at the top of the page now indicates that you are logged in and gives you direct access to key parts of your K4P user menu (see FAQ: What is my user menu?), as well as a 'log out' link.

Your user menu is where you manage your profile, knowledge and interactions on Knowledge4Policy.

To access your user menu, login (see What is a K4P account, how do I create one and how do I use it?). The Login link now gives you a dropdown, pointing to several key pages in your user menu, which currently contains:

• Stay informed: the user menu home page provides a feed of all activity on the site relevant to you:
  • ► My notifications
  • ► My messages, where you will find all your messages and answers.
  • ► Manage your notifications, where you can currently set your email notification frequency on or off.
• My profile:
  • ► Edit/View profile, where you create and edit your personal profile (see FAQ: What is my personal profile?).
  • ► My memberships, where you can view and manage your membership of knowledge service communities and (later) closed working groups.
• My knowledge: where you can subit knowledge to K4P, and view the knowledge you have already submitted.

More community features are under development, so the above pages will evolve as new features arrive (see About the K4P Community).

What is it?  

In the interests of transparency, a public personal profile is required before you can contribute to Knowledge4Policy, so all K4P users know who is contributing each piece of knowledge. The more detail you provide about yourself, the more credible your contributions.

How do I create and submit my personal profile?

Login, navigate to your user menu (see FAQ: What is my user menu?) and click “My profile”.  

Fill in the form. Note that:

• you will have already agreed to the privacy policy and terms and conditions when logging in;
• you can save your form in draft format and return to it later
• your name and email are provided by EU Login and cannot be changed
• two fields are mandatory:
  • "At a Glance"
  • choose at least one knowledge service*
• information on the ‘Contact me’ section can be found in FAQ: What is ‘Contact me’ and how does it work?

(*) Choosing a knowledge service is unavailable until the first knowledge service community launches, so you cannot currently complete and submit your profile. Please save it in draft format for now.

What happens after I submit my personal profile?

Once you have submitted your personal profile, the community manager(s) of the knowledge service(s) you included will check your profile.  

What happens when my personal profile is approved?

You can submit your profile to multiple knowledge services at once. Alternatively, you can apply to one and then apply to other knowledge services later by adding them to your profile.  

The first time any knowledge service community manager approves your profile, your personal profile’s status becomes ‘public’. It is published and now appears in the global K4P members gallery. You can also use ‘Ask a scientist’ and ‘Contact me’ (see next FAQs, below).

Moreover, you are now a member of that knowledge service, which means that:  

• your profile also appears in the knowledge service’s "Our members" gallery;  
• a link to the knowledge service appears in your profile;
• you will be able to submit knowledge to that knowledge service, and comment on blog posts;
• you will be use other interactive features when those features become available.

The second and subsequent times a different knowledge service’s community manager approves your public profile, you join that knowledge service as well. If a knowledge service’s manager does not approve your (already public) profile, your profile remains public, but you simply do not join that knowledge service.

‘Contact me’ is a feature allowing two members to message each other privately without publishing their email address.

If you turn this feature on in your personal profile (see FAQ: What is my personal profile and how do I create and manage mine?), a form appears on your public personal profile through which other members can message you.

Both members need to turn ‘Contact me’ on to exchange messages.  

• The only people who can send you a message are those ones that also have ‘Contact me’ turned on, so you can message them back.
• If you want to send someone a message, you have to agree to receive messages from other members who have it turned on.

When you send a message via the ‘Contact me’ form to another member:

• your message appears in that member’s user menu (the Stay Informed ► My messages page - see FAQ: What is my user menu?);
• the member also receives an email notification pointing to the message, and will see it in their notifications feed on their user menu home page;
• all messages are private.

‘Ask a scientist’ is similar in many ways to ‘Contact me’ (see FAQ: What is ‘Contact me’, and how does it work?).  

• It allows members with a public personal profile to send a private message to one of the K4P community managers (see FAQ: Who are the online community managers on K4P?).
• All messages are private.

Unlike ‘Contact me’, members only need a public personal profile – members don’t need to turn ‘Contact me’ on themselves to contact a community manager via ‘Ask a scientist’.

You can submit a question to a K4P community manager via their personal profile, which you’ll find on the knowledge service home page, featured topics and featured tools which they manage. They only handle questions relevant to their work, and as time allows. Messages which do not respect the Terms and conditions may result in the member being temporarily or permanently banned.

Your message, and any replies from the K4P community manager, will appear in your user menu (the Stay informed ► My messages page - see FAQ: What is my user menu?). You will also receive an email notification pointing to the message and will see it in your notifications feed on your user menu home page.

Precondition: You can only submit knowledge to a knowledge service if you are a member of its knowledge service community (see FAQ: What is my personal profile, and how do I create and manage mine?).

Basic procedure:

1. Login, navigate to your user menu (see FAQ: What is my user menu?) and click “My knowledge”
2. Under ‘Create knowledge’ use the dropdowns to select
   • the type of knowledge you want to submit (see below)
   • the knowledge service you want to submit it to (choose the most relevant one from the knowledge services you are a member of)
3.     Click “Create”
4.     Fill in the form (see FAQ: Creating knowledge, step by step) and then either:
   • save your knowledge as a draft, in which case you will be able to find and edit it from your user menu under ‘My knowledge’ ► Drafts
   • submit your knowledge to the knowledge service chosen. You will receive a notification if the knowledge is accepted or not.

Knowledge types. You are currently able to create the following types of knowledge:

• Publication
• Blog posts (commentable)
• News
• Event
• Dataset: describes a dataset useful to scientists and policymakers
• Glossary item: provide the definition of a term
• Project/Activity: a process which results in the above sorts of knowledge
• Organisation: profile of an organisation which publishes or is involved in the above sorts of knowledge
• Online resource: a useful piece of content published online which does not fit into any of the above categories - e.g. an external website or online database.

More details are provided in FAQ: Creating knowledge, step by step.

The knowledge creation process set out in FAQ: How do I submit knowledge? involves filling out several fields.

Common fields used by all knowledge types:

• Title
• Summary: the short text which appears in search results. If it is left blank, the first few lines of the body are displayed. This is rarely ideal, so summaries are strongly encouraged.
• Under metadata, choose the terms under ‘Taxonomy’ which best describe the content to help users discover your knowledge. Just start typing and see what the system proposes.
• Image: optional. Recommended if it provides useful information.
• Related organisations: this is used to link the knowledge item to the organisation profile of its author or publisher, link a project/activity to the organisations involved in it, link an event to its organiser, etc. In all cases, start typing the organisation’s name:
  • if it exists in the K4P database, you will be able to select it from the list that appears
  • if it does not, why not submit an organisation profile as well?
• External URL: if the knowledge you are submitting is already published elsewhere online, we strongly advise you to check this box and provide the URL. By doing this, we ensure we do not duplicate content published elsewhere on the internet and avoid copyright issues. Users will see the title and summary, and will be sent to the external URL to obtain the full knowledge.

If you uncheck “external URL”, then you will be publishing the knowledge in full on Knowledge4Policy. You will therefore need to provide a body: the main text appearing on the page. Overlong texts are less likely to be approved, so please be succinct and use clear web writing techniques.

Finally, there are some fields specific to individual content types – for example:

• Events: you will need to provide start and end dates and a location.
• Publication: there are 4 subtypes.
  • Study: a scientific report or similar, generally written by scientists, for scientists
  • Briefing: a shorter, “executive summary” document providing a scientific briefing principally for non-scientists
  • Leaflet/Brochure: more promotional, less detail
  • Audio-visual material
• Dataset: additional fields exist for linking to the source of the dataset, specifying the data’s geographic and temporal coverage, frequency, point of contact, etc.
• Glossary: use the “Reference” field to link to external sources, definitions or relevant research.
• Project/Activity: you can link your Project/Activity to any knowledge which it produced via the metadata ► Related resources field. Start typing the knowledge item’s title:
  • if it exists in the K4P database, you will be able to select it from the list that appears
  • if it does not, why not submit it?

Please see our privacy policy.

Knowledge4Policy is built and maintained by a small team within the EU Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). The content comes from ~20 JRC teams ("Knowledge Services").

Knowledge4Policy is built using the Drupal content management system, specifically a Drupal platform known as "Open EUROPA", coupled to the "Europa Component Library" design language.

Both are maintained by the EU Commission's IT department (DIGIT), and are open source, as is the K4P-specific code. It is therefore theoretically possible to set up your own website, although both DIGIT's and K4P's code and design will require substantial adaptation.

Before deciding whether that is worth the effort, you might want to better understand the theory underpinning the website's architecture. Some good places to start can be found in Building knowledge for policy, notably:

• the two page "Brief me" document (Knowledge4Policy: Structure & Future, pdf)
• the audience research we undertook as we got started - start with Evidence-based policymaking: a story emerges from audience research

The K4P team is interested in exchanging audience research, ideas and insights on how best to design science4policy websites, so if you would like to join the conversation please take this short survey.

To learn more, please join the Evidence-informed policymaking knowledge service, and contact Mathew Lowry using the Contact Me feature (above).