3. Hallo researcher
friend, what do you
do to make sure
your research is
found and applied
by a broad
audience?
I publish it!
Yay me!
@charlierapple #arma16
4. Well, that’s great,
except that
publishers don’t
really have the
capacity to do much
promotion of
individual works.
Something like 50%
never get read.
Oh.
@charlierapple #arma16
5. There are some
quick things you
could do yourself to
make sure your
work achieves its
potential, and your
institution can help
you too.
My institution, eh?
@charlierapple #arma16
6. There are some
quick things you
could do yourself to
make sure your
work achieves its
potential, and your
institution can help
you too. The
library?
My
department?
My
project’s
comms
person?
The
press
and
comms
team?
The
research
office?
@charlierapple #arma16
7. There are some
quick things you
could do yourself to
make sure your
work achieves its
potential, and your
institution can help
you too.
WHAT DO YOU
MEAN BY MY
INSTITUTION??!
@charlierapple #arma16
11. What will you do to
achieve your goals?
TEAMS 1 and 4:
your goal is to make sure
no-one
can find, read, apply,
benefit from your
institution’s research
15
TEAMS 2 and 5:
your goal is to
minimize
any chance of researchers
participating in efforts
to increase the reach
and impact of their work
TEAMS 3 and 6:
your goal is to
make it difficult
for institutional staff to
collaborate in
efforts to broaden
reach and impact
@charlierapple #arma16
Hallo - I’m Charlie Rapple and I’m one of the founders of Kudos.
Which is a platform for researchers to explain and share publications so that they can reach a wider audience.
That’s pretty much all I’m going to say about Kudos – there’s some info about us on your seats and of course hang around later if you want to learn more.
Our focus today is to share experiences and ideas for broadening the audience for published research.
Rightly or wrongly, publications are a critical part of researchers’ career development
– this slide represents a great anecdote from some interviews I undertook recently among researchers
Where one of the professors was laughing about how everyone suddenly paid much more attention to the lab’s temp
When they realised she had her name on a Nature paper.
My researcher friends have tended to think that getting published is “job done” in terms of ensuring their work finds an audience.
But in an age of information overload – and of growing metricisation -
It’s of course not enough just to get your work published.
Publishers do lots of things really well
But their focus is on selling content to libraries
Not on maximizing the readership of each individual piece of research they publish.
And this is news to quite a lot of the researchers I talk to!
So I try to encourage them to take more control of the impact of their publications
- Using tools that are available to help them broaden the discoverability of their work
Seeking support from their publisher
Or their institution – at which point things can start to unravel a bit
Often people don’t know who within their institution to turn to for support.
Indeed we did a survey when we started Kudos and when we asked “does your institution provide support for increasing the reach and impact of your work”
50% of 4,000 respondents said no or don’t know.
When I’ve dug into that in my interviews, it’s more that they aren’t really sure who is responsible for this
And in the conversations I’ve had with institutions, I see there is a similar level of uncertainty
Lots of groups are considered to have a stake
Ownership isn’t clear
And people either don’t do anything, for fear of treading on other people’s toes
Or they do things in siloes, unable to benefit from each others’ efforts because they don’t know about them.
So that’s the context in which I proposed this workshop- to explore who is involved in broadening reach, and think about techniques that we can use together with our researchers to ensure their work is found, read and applied by as broad an audience as possible.
As a first exercise I think it would be useful just to spend a couple of minutes throwing out ideas of who could or should be involved in helping researchers increase the visibility of their publications
I put a few ideas on my slide earlier
Who else is in the picture?
Bring your ideas and put them on the wall - overlap it with any other notes there that are the same or similar
Where do we already see collaboration between these groups?
Is any single group an obvious leader?
What is the takeway from this? There’s not enough collaboration? There’s plenty but it’s haphazard? It’s completely dependent on individuals? It varies by institution? We could use some best practice here? All of the above?
Let’s move now from the different people and groups that are involved,
To think about the how – the actions each of us is, or could be, taking.
For this I thought it would be fun to use a reversal technique
It would be good if we could form ourselves into 6 groups (count round – 1-6)
In your groups then you’ll brainstorm “what not to do” ideas – so temporarily we’ll focus on the the reverse of what we actually want to achieve
So here are some suggested “goals”!
Make sure NO-ONE can find, read, apply or benefit from your institution’s research
MINIMIZE any chance of researchers participating in efforts to increase the reach and impact of their work
MAKE IT DIFFICULT for institutional staff to collaborate in efforts to broaden reach and impact
You can see my suggestion for which teams tackle which challenge, but feel free to come up with your own reverse goal if you prefer.
You’ve got TEN MINUTES to have fun throwing crazy ideas around – the more extreme, the better.
And then I’ll give you five minutes to pick your favourites and put them on a post-it ready to add to the board! GO!
Going round: 1 idea from 1 group at a time (so 2-3 times round 6 groups)
– please come and place your idea on the board and read it out for the group
Now let’s flip them over - which ideas seem good ones when reversed
– and who do we think could collaborate on making those good ideas a reality?
Your favourite idea or something you think you could actually put into action quite easily, or a conversation you are already itching to start – if you were going to take one action for yourself away from this session, what would it be?