We have a lot to say. And people are listening.

The Smithsonian has hit a milestone in its efforts to diffuse its knowledge to the public: 42 paleontologists, astrophysicists, conservators, historians, and other experts among the Smithsonian’s scholarly community have written 50 articles for The Conversation.

The Conversation is an independent, non-profit news outlet whose mission is to democratize scholarly knowledge. To that end, they only publish articles written by scholars like ours about topics they are experts in. The Conversation publishes all of this content under a creative commons license, meaning any newspaper, magazine, blog, or educational platform around the world can republish their articles for free.

The Smithsonian has been a member of The Conversation since 2023, but our scholars have been contributing stories to the platform for more than a decade. In total, our articles have been read collectively more than two million times in big cities and small towns across America and in virtually every country in the world. Top news outlets like the Washington Post, PBS, Salon, and Popular Science have republished our scholars’ articles. Smithsonian Magazine has republished 17 of our articles, mostly by our own accord through Smithsonian Voices.

News producers keep an eye on The Conversation to find experts and interesting stories to include in their own coverage. A series of articles written by our political historians at the National Museum of American History led to a feature in CBS Mornings, and an article by an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory led to an interview on an immensely popular astronomy YouTube channel. One article led to local news radio interviews in Chicago and Los Angeles.

The Smithsonian can attribute half of its reads to just one article: “Firefighting Planes are Dumping Water on the Los Angeles Fires – Why Using Saltwater is Typically a Last Resort.” Kudos to author Pat Megonigal, associate director of research at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, for writing this article on quick notice, over a weekend, to ensure its timely publication amidst the LA wildfire emergency in January 2025. The article was published in two languages: The Conversation’s Brazil bureau translated the article into Portuguese, and this version was republished by the largest Portuguese-language news outlet in the world.

Other top articles include:

• Could dinosaurs still exist somewhere in the world? A paleontologist explains by Hans Sues, the curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Natural History.
• Remind me again, what is thalidomide and how did it cause so much harm? by Arthur Daemmrich, who was, at the time, the director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History
• The hidden story of two African-American women looking out from the pages of a 19th-century book by Kate Clarke Lemay, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, along with a collaborator at Johns Hopkins University
• Rare portraits reveal the humanity of the slaves who revolted on the Amistad by Kate McMahon, a historian of global slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

If you’re a scholar and your brain is filled with knowledge that you’re just aching to share with the public, the Conversation is the platform you need. View all of the Smithsonian’s Conversation articles here and learn more about how you can contribute a story on this Sharepoint site.