Mobilizing authors to promote their own research
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Talk given at the 2017 North American conference of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE). Tips and experiences in relation to encouraging authors of scholarly / research publications to get more involved in maximising the reach and impact of their work. In summary: * Make it easy * Demonstrate the value they will get * Provide support * Make it personal * Make it fun
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Mobilizing authors to promote their own research
- 1. to promote their own content Charlie Rapple @charlierapple #ISMTE2017 Mobilizing authors
- 2. 22 upload copies of publications (articles / books / chapters etc) to SCNs 57 % Survey by Kudos and 10 publisher partners; April 2017; n = 6,293 #ISMTE2017 @charlierapple Authors are already promoting their content
- 3. 33 Mobilizing authors to promote their work in a way that keeps publishers in the picture #ISMTE2017
- 4. 44 helps publishers and editors maximize usage reach new audiences strengthen author relationships benefit more from authors’ sharing 23% #ISMTE2017 @charlierapple
- 5. EXPLAIN SHARE MEASUR E make it easy “Kudos is so simple to use - I can effortlessly share my research on multiple platforms and track it from the Kudos dashboard.” Dr Mark F. Weems, Medicine and Medical Science, University of Tennessee
- 8. 88 you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it #ISMTE2017 @charlierapple
- 9. 99 0 50 100 150 200 Control group Treatment group Proactively explaining and sharing work increases downloads by 23% n = 4,858 n = 4,866 Median full text downloads 121 149 show value
- 10. 1010 show value
- 11. 1111 Does automated curation and data standardization contribute to improved QSAR Models? K. Mansouri, C. M. Grulke, A. M. Richard, R. S. Judson, A. J. Willia ms SAR and QSAR in Environmental Research, Nov 2016 DOI: 10.12688/ f1000researc h.8013.1 What’s it about? We used a manual approach to c urate struc ture based data for a public ly available physic ochemic al property dataset. Using this experienc e we developed an automation proc edure using KNIME to process multiple other datasets and then developed QSARprediction models and examined the influenc e of data c uration on the statistic al performanc e of the models. Why is it important? Data quality is important. For the development of QSAR predic tion models this paper showsthe importance of data c uration and how it influenc es the resulting statistic al performanc e of the models and why it is worth the upfront investment in c hec king and validating the data. This work focused only on the chemic al struc tures, NOTthe ac tua l property values, and even thismade a measurab le differenc e to the algorithmic performanc e. Perspectives Dr Antony Williams (Author) I have been working on issues regarding data quality for years and this partic ular example clearly demonstrates the impact on QSAR models. The resulting models are available via the online website https:// c omptox.epa.gov and are exposed with all of the relevant statistic s for global and local domain of applic ability as well as nearest neighbors. The QSAR Model Report Format reports detail the development of the models and ALL training and test data are available also. This, I believe, is a major contribution to Open Science in our domain. Share this publication profile on ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley or other profile and networking sites to help researchers find and understand your work. Sharing of this profile is fully supported by the publisher and complies with their sharing guidelines. This profile was created on Kudos – create your free profile at www.growkudos.com https:// goo.gl/ zxPn8N Read PDF generated on 14-Jan-2017 make it easy show value
- 15. 1515 5 tips for encouraging authors to promote their work? Make it easy Demonstrate value Provide support Make it personal Make it fun charlie@growkudos.com
Editor's Notes
- Hallo ; thankyou Lindsay; And thanks to Kim and ISMTE for inviting me to join this session.
- The title I started with was “getting authors involved in promoting their own content” But of course, authors are already promoting their own content! George referred to the Nature survey in which 57% of respondents said they used scholarly collaboration networks to support self or research promotion And coincidentally, in a survey we conducted around the same time, which had over 7,500 respondents, we had the same figure – 57% - saying they upload copies of their articles and books to scholarly collaboration networks.
- So the challenge for those of us here, then, is not “how to get authors to promote their work” It’s “how can we encourage them to do this in a way that doesn’t cut publishers out of the picture – how can we persuade authors to promote their work in ways that publishers can support, amplify, learn from and benefit from.” Because it is of course a HUGE concern that 57% of authors are uploading copies of their work to “off grid” sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu where the access to those publications can’t be managed or tracked by publishers. And this is the challenge we’re tackling at Kudos, where we’re helping publishers and journals to embrace authors’ instinct to share but in a way that is visible to, beneficial to, and trackable by publishers.
- Our service helps you: Maximize readership – I’ll come back to that 23% statistic We’re also focused on helping research reach new audiences Strengthening relationships between authors and journals And you to benefit more from authors’ efforts to share their work – as authors begin increasingly to share work in sites like ResearchGate, Kudos provides a way to ensure that that activity benefits rather than harms the journal.
- How do we get authors to use the tools that we’ve developed for them? Step one is to make it easy! Our workflow takes authors about 10-15 minutes – they add a plain language explanation of their work, and generate trackable links so that whatever they do to share – whether they tend to prefer email, or use social media, or conference talks and posters – we can make this trackable for them. And the final step in the process, therefore, is that we bring together a range of metrics to show them the effect of their efforts. So what has worked really well for us is boiling down something potentially complex – promoting your work across lots of different channels – into a simple, measurable process.
- Another way we’ve worked to “make it easy” is by integrating as much as possible into existing systems and services, to reduce duplication of effort for authors. We partnered with ORCID very early on to enable authors to import their publications into Kudos. A more recent example is our integration of Kudos into manuscript submission workflows - authors can add plain language explanations in Editorial Manager or Scholar One (and we’re launching others soon) – these are then passed on to Kudos for further dissemination after publication. In a pilot, 50% of authors completed the “Kudos” field so this has been a great way to get more authors promoting their work by making it part of an existing process at a point when they are really focused on making that publication a success.
- We also focused right from the outset on making it really obvious to authors what effect their efforts are having. We not only bring in common metrics such as Altmetric scores and Times Cited counts, but also put that together with the metrics from their communications – how many people clicked on the links that they shared or went on to read the publication And then we map all of these together in graphs where “actions” to share are set against the changing metrics – here the orange line is downloads on the publisher website - so they can really explicitly see how their actions are driving readership of their work. Showing authors that an email, or a LinkedIn posting, can increase the level of readership of their work so directly and significantly, is hugely motivating and encourages authors to make more time for outreach.
- In that context, another thing we’re seeing that I think is relevant here is a move “beyond metrics”. There’s been a lot of interest in exploring and understanding new metrics. But institutions in particular have realised that improving performance needs to be a bigger priority than simply measuring it. One bibliometrics expert uses this memorable expression in that context, and suggested it should become our new strapline at Kudos! The point is that authors are certainly interested in metrics for their work, but metrics by themselves aren’t enough – we also need to give them tools and guidance to help them improve their performance rather than just passively measure it.
- And of course any evidence you can find that shows promotional tools working is helpful for motivating authors. A recent independent study showed that articles for which the Kudos tools had been used have 23% higher growth in downloads than articles for which our tools hadn’t been used. That’s ultimately showing the overall value of author-led promotional efforts and is a great incentive for authors to make a little time for outreach.
- This is an obvious one but worth mentioning. Once you have facts and figures – either at that high level, or for specific individuals – things like case studies are great for helping authors get a feel for how other researchers in their subject area or at their career level are promoting their work, and what kinds of results they’re getting.
- Both of my points so far - about “making it easy” and “clearly adding value” - are relevant to our work to tackle illegal sharing via sites like ResearchGate. From the perspective of making it easy: the project builds on our integrations into the manuscript submission workflow, and enables us to create a “summary” PDF and send that to the author at the point when the article itself is published. The summary PDF contains a link to the full text on the publisher website. When we email it to them, we can include links to popular networks like ResearchGate and Academia.edu. So it will be easier for the authors to upload the summary PDF than to make the effort to find and share the full text PDF. In our survey of over 7500 researchers, 83% agreed that copyright should be respected, from which I interpret authors aren’t uploading copies of their full text to these sites with the deliberate intention of contravening copyright. They’re doing it because they feel under pressure to have a presence on those sites, and the only way they can do this is by uploading PDFs. So let’s give them an alternative PDF, that doesn’t contain the full text, and make it easier to upload that! In terms of showing value, the shareable PDF approach also consolidates all the usage of the work on the publisher website. So right now, if authors create copies of their works in other sites, they create a rod for their own backs in terms of having to manually track and count up the readership of their work. Because these sites are “off grid” for publishers and institutions, there is no way for anyone other than the author to measure this usage. And increasingly, as publishers are making download counts publicly visible on article pages, authors are doing themselves a disservice if they are depressing that count by encouraging usage of their work to happen elsewhere. The shareable PDF option is therefore compelling for an author because they can basically carry on with the same workflow - but now all the usage of their work will happen on the publisher site, and the counts on the publisher site will therefore give a much better picture of the usage of their work, to readers, to institutions, to funders and indeed to the author themselves - they will no longer have to put manual effort into compiling the picture of their readership. This is a live project for us and there are still seats available for new participants, so if illegal sharing via sites like ResearchGate and Academia.edu is a concern for your organization, and something you’d like to try and tackle urgently, and positively, and cost effectively (rather than by expensive and negative legal campaigns), then come and chat with me afterwards!
- Of course one thing that will encourage more authors to promote their work is if they feel that you are supporting, matching, amplifying their efforts. Providing 1-2-1 support for authors’ communications is not feasible for most publishers or societies. At Kudos, we try to help with this by providing dashboards that enable you to support and interact with authors’ efforts – in a relatively efficient, scalable way, We summarize which authors are actively promoting their work, how, when, where, and to what effect. [CLICK] You can use this to identify influencers, rising stars, high interest content, and so on – and let this intelligence shape your editorial and author care strategies. Our intelligence can help you improve the guidance you give to authors with practical suggestions for how they should focus their communications: this kind of “actionable intelligence” is a useful way to make your service to authors more competitive – providing meaningful, personalised guidance, and easy tools to put that into practice. [CLICK] But as well as this kind of strategic support, Kudos also enables you to provide some real hands on support for your authors – for example, the Twitter widget on the bottom right provides you with a time-efficient way to have an interactive relationship with authors, and help amplify their communications efforts, with minimal effort on your part – Kudos takes all the effort of finding, filtering, monitoring, measuring their Tweets – you just need to hit “retweet” or “reply” or “like” – or all 3!
- We’ve recently introduced a new email system, Customer.io, which enables us to send very tailored messages about what authors have done in the system so far, and what they could achieve if they take a very specific next step. We’ve seen a 70% increase in authors explaining their work in Kudos, and a 200% increase in authors using Kudos to managing their sharing, as a result of this more personalised approach.
- And finally we’re great believers in making it fun! We’ve worked with our publisher partners on a number of games, competitions, hashtag campaigns and so on. Our latest game is a quiz to help researchers evaluate their understanding of how research impact is built and enhanced. About 6,000 people have played it so far and it’s helped them learn more about the importance of promoting their work, and has been a channel by which people have then gone on to sign up for Kudos.
- So in summary then! My 5 top tips for encouraging authors to promote their work: Give them simple processes and tools so there is something quick and easy for them to do Make sure you clearly demonstrate the value of what you are asking them to do so they can see it’s worthwhile Don’t just leave them to get on with it – provide support and amplification of their efforts The more personal you can make your outreach to them, the more likely they will be to take action And if you can make it fun and educational as well, so much the better!