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| Chart of the Download Activity for “Digital Curiosities” from UCL “Discovery.” - Melissa Terras Link to blog post |
The RSC and Taylor & Francis are supporting a pilot programme with Kudos, a start-up that provides tools and services to help researchers maximise the usage and impact of their published research articles.
The need for a service like Kudos arises from developments in global academic and research policies that are increasingly calling for evolving interpretations and measurements of 'impact' - used to assess researcher excellence. Publishers already invest editorial, marketing and technological expertise in making research articles discoverable. Kudos will further support this by helping leverage the expertise and social networks of researchers and research communities themselves in order to drive visibility and usage.
http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2013/Kudos-RSC-launch.asp
RSC use Altmetrics data and display this at article level through 'donuts'. The 'donut' is the chosen visual, infographic style of Altmetrics for displaying data from all the major social media platforms. They allow visibility of this data across different dimensions of scale and time. Among other things, this includes blogs, tweets, shares and pins!
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| The altmetric 'donut' |
Alternative metrics are of great interest and value to the authors, but less so to RSC. The alternative measures of articles don’t necessarily have an impact on RSC as a publishing platform as they are not a measure of scientific correctness or quality. However, these metrics do enable a unique insight for authors into exactly where in the world their work is being discussed and on what platform. This information is instantly, visually communicable to the author.
More and more, social media platforms are becoming a vital link in the discovery chain. Because in large part it requires engagement by authors it is often underutilised. In some disciplines this activity is fostering a two-tier digital divide. See this blog by Melissa Terras Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities and Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL's Department of Information Studies who shares her experiences of using twitter to increase the impact of her papers.
http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-3/the-impact-of-social-media-on-the-dissemination-of-research-by-melissa-terras/
It is becoming increasingly important for authors to actively disseminate their research using their social network of peers and more work needs to be done, particularly with regard to appropriate training in building a digital online profile and making best use of discipline specific dissemination platforms.
Kudos is a web-based service that helps researchers, their institutions and funders to maximise the visibility and impact of their published articles. Across the multitude of social channels. Kudos provides a platform for assembling and creating information to help share information to drive discovery, and for measuring and monitoring the effect of these activities.
This may help researchers who want assistance with increasing usage of and citations to their publications by helping to push papers across a horde of social platforms that forms part of the author’s social network. This could help increase the impact of the research.
This is particularly true when you consider that a paper may of most relevance (in the first instance) to an author’s personal network, which may take the form of a discipline specific, academic community. An author’s professional network (established and maintained over many years) can be harnessed and exploited by pushing new publications through these channels.
Presently it is only the corresponding authors who get an invitation to sign up to Kudos through RSC. The tool helps by enriching an articles metadata with additional terms that is more suitable to dissemination across platforms like twitter – for example, some article titles would never fit within the 120 character limit. Shorter titles for dissemination purposes help with discoverability and readability on busy platforms like twitter.
RSC were quick to point out that in their opinion this is not gaming. This process is increasing the visibility of their papers across the web and to authors professional networks. As a tool, Kudos gives authors the chance to compete quickly and effectively against others who have been utilising these channels to their advantage for some years.
So far RSC have found that only a small group of authors are very engaged with Kudos. This may be indicative of a lack of awareness or training around these issues. It is possibly also a reflection of the varying nature of how communities of practice are fostered and communicate ideas with each other.
Interestingly RSC recently experimented with author the idea of bringing life back to old papers by using these social media channels. The author found by send them out into the global sphere he immediately saw a reflection in his Alternative Metrics scores. This author hopes this shows that his papers are not dead and their use can be extended beyond publication. His view is that article level metrics of this kind should become a normalised measure and part of the portfolio of impact assessment tools.
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| New life for papers? |
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