What does the representation of disability in museums today have to do with nineteenth-century protest marches by British blanket makers? What does sculpture in the Ottoman Empire have to do with the differences between comic book horror vs film horror in the 1990s? What does eugenics have to do with railway routes?
Probably not much beyond the fact that they are all topics that have been published by Liverpool University Press, and explained and shared via Kudos. The two organizations have been working together for a bit over a year now to help researchers increase the visibility, reach and impact of their published work by explaining and sharing it. It typically takes 15 minutes for researchers to do this, and Kudos’ pilot study found that publications for which the Kudos toolkit had been used had 19% higher usage than those for which the tools were not used.
What’s involved?
Authors are invited to use the platform at www.growkudos.com to explain their work, by adding plain language descriptions of what it is about and why it is important, along with links to related materials that provide further insight, context or detail. You can also tell the story behind the research with a personal “perspective” – perhaps explaining your overall interest in the field, or commenting on how your views have evolved since this particular publication appeared. These explanatory statements can attract potential readers searching for terms that might not otherwise be in the “formal” publication, and they help a wider audience to understand the work and its potential relevance to their own studies or research.
Authors can also use Kudos as a central platform from which to share their work. However you typically let others know about your publications – whether by email, social media, academic networks, or other websites – you can use trackable links generated for you by Kudos to gain a better understanding of which of these options is most effectively increasing readership of your work.
This is because Kudos brings together a range of performance metrics to help you measure the effect of your communications. We uniquely map your explaining and sharing activities against clicks, views, downloads, citations and altmetrics so that you can easily see which activities are improving which metrics. This helps you make the most of your limited time for outreach by giving you a clear indication of where to focus your efforts – Facebook or Twitter, ResearchGate or Academia.edu, email or blogs – and so on.
How does Liverpool University Press fit in?
Our partnership with publishers like the Press gives them insight into how, when and where researchers communicate about their publications. This enables them to amplify your sharing (for example, helping broaden the audience reached by retweeting), to repurpose the explanations you add (for example, in communications with the media), and to optimise their own communications (by learning at the aggregate level which platforms seem to generate most interest).
Who benefits?
As an author: you can help your work get in front of more people who might read and build on it, both within and beyond academia; using Kudos to manage your sharing enables both your publisher and institution to build on your efforts. You can save time, by learning which communication tools and networks to focus your efforts on. You can breathe new life into older work by adding text and links that show its continued relevance.
As a reader: about 60,000 researchers are currently signed up to explain and share their work via Kudos. As this grows, and plain language explanations become more widely available, it will also be quicker for you to skim more of the literature and filter down to the most relevant publications to which you want to devote reading time. Readers will therefore be able to digest more of the literature, in their own and in peripheral fields. Non-specialist readers already find it fascinating to explore Kudos and learn the stories behind a wide range of research.
How can I get involved?
Sign up today at www.growkudos.com and find one of your publications. We suggest you start with just one rather than finding everything in the first instance – let the toolkit show you what it can do for one publication, and then come back to find, explain and share others!
This blog post was written by Charlie Rapple, Co-Founder and Sales & Marketing Director of Kudos.
To get an idea of what an article’s profile looks like, take a look at these examples:
Liverpool University Press Blog 