Availability ≠ accessibility: Broadening the impact and accessibility of openly available research

Availability ≠ accessibilityBroadening the impact and accessibility

of openly available research

Charlie Rapple @charlierapple

Co-founder • Sales & Marketing Director • Kudos

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Social media

Many kinds of metric

Do

wn

loa

ds

Bo

okm

ark

s

Citations

Shares

Traditional media

Mentions“”

Clicks

Views

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Many sources of metrics

But impact isn’t

all about metrics

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Academic

impact

NEWTON

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Impact requires visibility

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Visibility to the right people

Challenge 1:

For (open access) publications to have

academic impact, people need better

support for filtering the literature and

finding work that is important for them

Academic impact = ability to find and filter

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Economic and

societal impact

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Impact requires understanding

Within your field

Within your discipline

In related fields /

disciplines

Outside academia

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Citizen scientists

@chrislintott

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Citizen scientists

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The wall of literature

Challenge 2:

For (open access) publications to have

broader impact, people need support

for crossing the threshold – explanatory

text that helps them understand

the literature

Impact = ability to understand

For a work to have impact, then,

people need to be able to:

1. Find and filter it (within academia)

2. Understand it (beyond academia)

For a work to have impact, then,

people need to be able to:

1. Find and filter it (within academia)

2. Understand it (beyond academia)

Both goals can be met by creating and

sharing brief, plain language

explanations of what a work is about,

and why it’s important.

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Finding, filtering and understanding

• 22% uplift in citations where

article titles had fewer than

94 characters, compared to

those with over 118 characters1

• Titles containing question mark,

reference to a geographical

region and a colon or hyphen

were associated with a lower

number of citations1, 2

1Plos One. Articles with short titles describing the results are cited more often. Paiva, da Silveria Nogueira

Lima, Paiva (2012)2The impact of article titles on citation hits: an analysis of general and specialist medical journals. Jacques,

Sebire (2010)

Short titles

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Finding, filtering and understanding

Plain language summariesof what the work is about,

and why it is important

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Finding, filtering and understanding

Terras, M. The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research:

Results of an Experiment. Journal of Digital Humanities 1:3, September 2012

Professor Melissa Terras

UCL

• Take 1 research project

• Add 4 resulting publications

• Share 3 of them on social media

and ignore the other one

• Downloads: 297, 290, 142

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Sharing via networks

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Finding, filtering and understanding

Terras, M. The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research:

Results of an Experiment. Journal of Digital Humanities 1:3, September 2012

Sharing via networks

• Take 1 research project

• Add 4 resulting publications

• Share 3 of them on social media

and ignore the other one

• Downloads: 297, 290, 142

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Professor Melissa Terras

UCL

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Finding, filtering and understanding

Terras, M. The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research:

Results of an Experiment. Journal of Digital Humanities 1:3, September 2012

Professor Melissa Terras

UCL

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Challenges of explaining and sharing

• Which channels?– What is the most effective way to share research – email? Facebook?

Twitter?

– Does this vary by discipline? By geographical region? By career level?

• Which publications?– Do you have time to do this for everything you publish?

– What about your ‘back catalogue’?

• How to see the effect?– Can you get article-level usage statistics from all your publishers?

– Can you get share / click-through / view stats from all your social media

tools?

– Can you combine all of this easily to see which activities and channels are

worth bothering with in future?

• How to share the results?– Can you let your institution or publisher know what you are doing so that

they will build on your efforts and you will benefit from further exposure?

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Rising to the challenge

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EXPLAIN ENRICH SHARE MEASURE

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Rising to the challenge

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Rising to the challenge

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Early results

19% higherarticle usage per day

for articles shared using the Kudos tools

compared to the control group

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Early results

+25%more click-throughs from

Kudos to the Publisher site

when the author has

explained / enriched the

article using the Kudos

tools

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In conclusion

• It’s not enough to publish work

• It’s not even enough to make it free

• You have to help people understand and filter it

• That is what delivers maximum impact!

Thank you! Any questions?

[email protected]

www.growkudos.com