To try and represent all the interactions influencing different parts of the science eco-system I have devised a network map. There are many ways to attempt this, and I am interested in comments and potential improvements. It will be hard to represent all the interaction in the system, but capturing the main flows and feedbacks helps understand how it evolves as a whole.

I have tried to include all the main `actors’ which interact within the ecosystem in this map. Actors encapsulate a particular group which could be people, organisations, or infrastructures, but have broadly similar motivations. The main actors are in the centre, and belong to many of the different spheres of activity, particularly universities, academics, learned societies and academies, and discipline conferences as well as the disciplines themselves. Sitting outside this are more specialised actors in the scientific spheres of different activity: funding, media, knowledge, people, and translation. These also share some aspects, which I tried to encapsulate in the spatial relationships.

Each instance of an actor competes directly with others within the same actor type: conferences compete among each other, newspapers with each other, and so on. These competitions are of different types: the ones labelled “1,2,3..” are of a type which can be scored in some way, for instance in citation counts (for academics), impact factors (for journals), or compiled indices (for universities). These are the most brutal competitions. Other go head to head (double headed arrows) but it is not clear what the right ranking criteria are (survival?, profit?) allowing many different modes to exist simultaneously in this contested ranking space. Still other actors are distinguished into types (circles) for instance of different size (conferences), or focus (research funders, academies). These directly interact with each other, trying to influence others (the public, governments) with implicit messages about how strong and important they are. A numerical ranking is not possible and again criteria are vague, but still a degree of competition exists within this class of actors.

The main flows of influence between these different actors are captured as the arrows of different colours. The flow of people through the careers of scientists is shown red. The way funding moves through the system is shown in purple (public money) and pink (industry money). The discovery and codification of science knowledge is shown in yellow (written) and through conferences (green). Finally the way that science moves from the researchers into the public sphere is in blue. Capturing the ecosystem in this visual way perhaps is complicated but depicts the way interactions flow through the space fairly clearly, and shows the tensions of competition within the whole.