This document discusses ideas for using research communications like publications, data, blogs, and repositories to showcase researchers' work and impact. It notes that blogs are evolving to contain high-quality scholarship and serve as an alternative to traditional journals that are not widely read. Researchers can use blogs to develop ideas, collaborate with others, and disseminate work more broadly than publications alone. The document recommends using various online platforms and tools to showcase research outputs, collaborate, and increase engagement, visibility, and career opportunities.

1. Research Communications
Some ideas for discussion GuildHE/CREST
symposium
13th December 2010
Richard M. Davis
University of London
Computer Centre
(Thanks also to Dr Fiona Denney, King's College London)

2. Research Communications
What?
Research Outputs
Publications
Data
Career information
Specialisms
Affiliations
Work-in-progress
for collaborators
for funders

3. Research Communications
Why?
Impact!
Engagement
Public
Community
Collaboration
Assessment
RAE
REF
Career / professional
development

4. Research Communications
How?
Journal articles
Conference papers
....

5. Research Communications
How?
Journal articles
Conference papers
Open Access
Insitutional repositories
Subject repositories
Social Scholarship
Mendeley/CiteULike etc
Academia.edu/LinkedIn etc
Portfolios/Registers of
experts
Blogs
Data repositories

6. Research Communications
It’s easy to miss the impact of blogs on research,
Blogs are evolving and being used for many
because most science blogs focus on outreach. But
valuable activities (here we highlight more and more blogs contain high quality
scholarship). Some bloggers spend hours or research content. [...] What we’re seeing here is a
more on a post. Bill Hooker has an incredible spectacular expansion in the range of the blog
set of statistics about the cost of Open Access medium. By comparison, the journals are standing
and Toll Access publications, page charges, etc. still.
Normally that would get published in a journal
no-one reads [...] So I tend to work out my half- Michael Nielsen
baked ideas in public.
Peter Murray Rust

7. Research Communications
Links
Peter Murray Rust blog post. Effective digital preservation is (almost) impossible; so
Disseminate instead. 26 June 2009. http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?
p=2159
Michael Nielsen blog post. Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted? 29 June
2009 http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/is-scientific-publishing-about-to-be-disrupted
South Park cartoons created using SP Studio. http://www.sp-studio.de/
I also explored some aspects of blogs and scholarship in an article for Ariadne: Moving
Targets: Web Preservation and Reference Management. http://www.ariadne.ac.
uk/issue62/davis/