Availability ≠ accessibility: Broadening the impact and accessibility of openly available research
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Slides from a talk given at the Oxford Publishing Society about how researchers can increase the impact of open access research (and research in general!). My conclusion is that: • It’s not enough to publish work • It’s not even enough to make it free • For maximum impact, you have to help people understand and filter it • This means providing quick and easy-to-read summaries for people within the field and adjacent fields, so they can more easily scan more of the literature to determine which information is most likely to help them make further advances • And it means providing plain language summaries for people outside the field, indeed outside academia, to give them a 'key' for unlocking the more technical language in which research publications are typically written. The event information is at http://www.opusnet.co.uk/events/forthcoming-events/the-impact-of-open-access The other speakers had given background on: • the adoption of open access within UK government policy • alternative metrics (altmetrics) and how they are 'created' • what impact means, and how we can make attempts to quantify it
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Availability ≠ accessibility: Broadening the impact and accessibility of openly available research
- 1. Availability ≠ accessibility Broadening the impact and accessibility of openly available research Charlie Rapple @charlierapple Co-founder • Sales & Marketing Director • Kudos
- 2. 2 Social media Many kinds of metric Downloads Bookmarks Citations Shares Traditional media Mentions “ ” Clicks Views
- 3. 3 Many sources of metrics
- 4. But impact isn’t all about metrics
- 7. 7 Visibility to the right people
- 8. 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
- 10. 10 Impact requires understanding Within your field Within your discipline In related fields / disciplines Outside academia
- 13. 13 The wall of literature
- 14. 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
- 15. 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)
- 16. 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.
- 17. 17 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
- 18. 18 Finding, filtering and understanding Plain language summaries of what the work is about, and why it is important
- 19. 19 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 12 Sharing via networks
- 20. 20 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 12 Professor Melissa Terras UCL
- 21. 21 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
- 22. 22 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?
- 23. 23 Rising to the challenge
- 24. 24 EXPLAIN ENRICH SHARE MEASURE
- 25. 25 Rising to the challenge
- 26. 26 Rising to the challenge
- 27. 27 Early results 19% higher article usage per day for articles shared using the Kudos tools compared to the control group
- 28. 28 Early results +25% more click-throughs from Kudos to the Publisher site when the author has explained / enriched the article using the Kudos tools
- 29. 29 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!
- 30. Thank you! Any questions? charlie@growkudos.com www.growkudos.com
Editor's Notes
- [As we’ve heard today]: two kinds of impact Firstly: Academic impact – “The demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to academic advances, across and within disciplines” In case you aren’t following my visual analogy, this is academic advances - “standing on the shoulders of giants”
- The biggest difficulty in academic impact is ensuring that research is found and read and applied. A big concern over the last twenty years or so has been whether people have been able to read research in order to apply it, i.e. whether they have access to the full text. This has been the driver of the Open Access movement.
- Now that that movement has had such substantial success, there is a need to consider whether the right people are sufficiently able to find the right research: Making something free makes it easier for people to read and apply research. What it doesn’t necessarily do is make it easier for them to find it: There are so many publications! – 50 million already, 2 million new ones every year, with this growth partly driven by the flourishing of open access. This means academics need new ways of filtering the literature to help them find the right research for them: the research that is most likely to enable them to make academic advances of their own.
- Secondly, there’s Economic and societal impact: “the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy, … by fostering global economic performance, and specifically the economic competitiveness of the United Kingdom, increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy, enhancing quality of life, health and creative output.” Open access mandates are designed to increase the public’s access to research and try to broaden its economic and societal impact, particularly in terms of that last piece about quality of life, health and creative output.
- The challenge here is making it easy for people outside niche academic fields to understand the research to which they now have access, And to help them understand what is important about it And to understand how they can apply it in their own context – whether that is a research context, a practitioner context, … or whatever it is that regular people want to access research for ;-)
- Hands up if you recognise someone in this picture? Keep your hands up if you recognise two people? Three? This guy is the really interesting one! His name is Chris Lintott and he’s based here in Oxford. He presents the Sky at Night, and he taught Bryan May how to use the research repository arXiv, when Bryan May decided that rather than accept an honorary PhD he would actually finish the one he started before Queen took off!
- More importantly, Chris started a website called Zooniverse. It runs a range of “citizen science” projects that enable regular people to contribute to real scientific research, online. For example, by clicking when they spot a penguin Helping to classify animals spotted in the Serengeti Marking up images from space telescopes And much more. The value of non-specialist “science attentives” is that they can be repurposed across multiple projects But they don’t read “the literature” and don’t “speak science”
- Chris talks about them “Running into the hard wall of the literature” Published research papers are hard to understand! And people don’t even try to read them, because they think they won’t be able to. Chris calls this “threshold fear” and says people need help to cross this threshold – plain language summaries of what is on the other side!
- A study published in 2012 (of over 400 research articles published in PLOS and BMC 3 years previously) found that articles with shorter titles were cited 22% more often than those with longer titles.
- Explaining work in plain language – and in forms other than text – can results in much higher levels of usage, and help attract media interest First, let me read you the formal abstract of this article: “Electrical signature in polar night cloud base variations” “Layer clouds are globally extensive. Their lower edges are charged negatively by the fair weather atmospheric electricity current flowing vertically through them. Using polar winter surface meteorological data from Sodankyla (Finland) and Halley (Antarctica), we find that when meteorological diurnal variations are weak, an appreciable diurnal cycle, on average, persists in the cloud base heights, detected using a laser ceilometer. The diurnal cloud base heights from both sites correlate more closely with the Carnegie curve of global atmospheric electricity than with local meteorological measurements. The cloud base sensitivities are indistinguishable between the northern and southern hemispheres, averaging a (4.0 ± 0.5) m rise for a 1% change in the fair weather electric current density. This suggests that the global fair weather current, which is affected by space weather, cosmic rays and the El Nino Southern Oscillation, is linked with layer cloud properties.” Now, let’s [watch this video] or I’ll read you the transcript of this short video made by the author and his institution: “One of the remarkable things about the atmosphere is that there’s a current flowing, all the way from the top of the atmosphere to the ground. This is generated globally, by thunderstorms, and the current flows around the entire planet. Here at Reading we have some sampling plates that allow us to collect that current and measure it. From measurements made in the 1920s on a sailing ship called the Carnegie, it was found that the current varied over the day like this (draws S curve), No matter where you are on the planet – with a minimum at about 3o’clock in the morning UT and at about 19hrs UT there was a maximum. So if you think of that happening on all days, this means that there’s a heartbeat of atmospheric electricity running through every day as a result of the Carnegie curve. We’re interested in whether this curve was actually present in clouds themselves: in other words, was there an effect of the current on the clouds through which they passed? To do that, we need to go somewhere where there’s very little in the way of other influences on the clouds. We went to the poles for that, because in the northern and southern hemisphere, measurements are routinely made of the bases of clouds, using lasers. They fire the light into the sky and measure how long it takes for the light to come back, and therefore work out the height of the cloud. So we took the hourly measurement of cloud base height from these two sites and compared them with the Carnegie curve. We found that there was a variation that was very similar. So this illustrates for the first time that there are changes in the clouds that we can associate with the Carnegie curve variations and the electrical currents that are flowing.” Suddenly we’ve all understood what this article is about! And let me tell you, if you go ahead to read the full text, it’s really helpful to have that video transcript as a guide to then understanding what the technical language of the article is saying. So a plain language explanation acts like a translator and navigator – helping you “cross the threshold” In this example, the addition of a video abstract resulted in this article having over 10 times the number of downloads of other articles in that issue that didn’t benefit from this kind of additional explanation
- Melissa Terras came back from maternity leave to discover that her institution had set up a repository and wanted their researchers to upload all their publications. This was a lot of effort and Melissa decided to treat it as an experiment, to see the value of adding research to an open access repository, and to see whether using social media can increase the reach and impact of research. She says: “I wrote a post about each paper or research project. I wanted to tell the stories behind the research — the things that don’t get into the published versions. I also set about methodically tweeting about these research papers.” Like many academics, once let off the leash of formal communication, she brings her research to life in a wonderfully passionate and accessible way – she continues: “I wrote about the stories behind the research papers — from becoming so immersed in developing 3D that you start walking into things in real life, to nearly barfing over the front row of an audience’s shoes whilst giving a keynote, to passive aggressive notes from an archaeological dig that take on a digital life of their own – this one got feature in the Guardian newspaper after featuring in the “passive aggressive notes” blog!” She added an element of control by breaking down the outputs from just one project and treating them differently: for 3 of the publications from that project, she tweeted and blogged about them as she uploaded them to the repository. For a final fourth publication from that project, she didn’t do anything to publicise its existence. It very quickly became clear that there was a correlation between talking about her research online and the spike in downloads of her papers from the UCL institutional repository. Her papers had previously had a TOTAL of 1-2 downloads over months and years of being in the repository 24 hrs after she began sharing them via social media, her papers averaged 70 downloads The articles that she tweeted about ended up being downloaded 10 to 20 times more than articles that she didn’t talk about in her social media channels. This inspired her to ask for download data from her publishers and she was excited to discover that she had a top twenty paper in “a really good journal in my discipline”. She does comment in the article on the fact that it wasn’t easy to get hold of this data, even from the journal of which she is on the ed board. (Ironically, that turned out to to be the hardest of the lot). “Why would journal publishers not make this information available to authors?” she asks – an important point to which we’ll return!
- The passive aggressive note to which Melissa referred!
- They go through a basic 4-step process Explain publications by adding simple descriptions that anyone can understand, and by highlighting what makes the work important. Enrich publications by adding links to related resources that help put research in context. Share publications by email and social media. Kudos is also working to share that content across discovery channels (such as search engines and subject indexes) to increase readership. Kudos enables researchers and their institutions and publishers to track the effect of their actions against a wide range of metrics, including downloads, citations and altmetrics.
- Over the last few years I’ve found that I Was getting asked these questions a lot So along with some colleagues I am trying to answer them! We’ve started a site called Kudos (www.growkudos.com)