You may have read our experts’ take on the benefits of individual researchers using Kudos. Last year in October 2015, Kudos also launched a new platform called Kudos for Institutions. This platform will help institutions take a strategic approach to increase researchers’ visibility, reach a wider audience, and have a wider impact of studies funded by them. Kudos can also provide reports on how their researchers are using the service to manage communications around their work and a range of article-level metrics including usage, altmetrics and citations. By mapping these against researchers’ use of Kudos’ toolkit, they can demonstrate the value of their actions and motivate continued effort.
By using Kudos, institutions can benefit in the following ways:
- Kudos is the only system that shows how communications efforts drive publication performance—people in academia are mostly interested in whether their work is being downloaded, read and cited and not interested in seeking likes and shares on social media. Researchers using Kudos’ system to generate trackable URLs makes sharing trackable, via social media, email, online or even offline, in things like conference slides and handouts. Kudos then works with publishers and metrics providers to gather a whole load of metrics against which the tracked actions can be mapped.
- Kudos helps researchers and institutions to understand which activities and media are most effective so that future efforts can be optimized and time saved.
- By showing such meaningful communications drive results shows that using Kudos correlates to 23% higher downloads, (see: https://blog.growkudos.com/2016/09/08/introducing-kudos-for-institutions-4-ways-you-can-benefit/) providing researchers with the necessary evidence to justify time spent on publicity efforts, thereby enabling and encouraging such efforts.
- Additional metadata to help increase discoverability. The advantages are twofold: 1) It makes it quicker for other specialists to determine whether to read the work in more depth, and helps people outside the field to understand and potentially apply or build on the work, and 2) the important benefit of plain language metadata helps broaden the discoverability of the work by expanding the range of search terms that are likely to find it.
- A nexus for collaboration between all research “stakeholders”. Any research project has multiple stakeholders who share a common goal of ensuring the work achieves its potential (whether by readership, citations, policy influence, public engagement, etc.). Efforts towards this common goal have, in the past, resulted in each stakeholder undertaking separate activities, which often duplicates effort, and there is no visibility of each other’s actions or results, making it almost impossible to share learnings or benefit from each other’s successes. By working with researchers directly, and their institutions, publishers, funders and societies, Kudos can provide a central system through which everyone can channel their efforts so each person can collaborate their research by seeing what others have done and learning from and building on to that to improve results. To view this more in detail, visit Kudos Greater Research Impact: https://blog.growkudos.com/2016/09/08/introducing-kudos-for-institutions-4-ways-you-can-benefit/.
- In the case of Open Access publication, where the author effectively becomes the customer, there is a critical need for the publisher to demonstrate specifically how they will help the author to gain the greatest reach and impact for their work (see: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/12/17/what-is-kudos-an-interview-with-david-sommer-co-founder/).
In short, Kudos’s reports help researchers, universities, research organizations, corporations and funders understand how they “measure, monitor and maximize” the visibility and impact of their published articles. They want to amplify and support their efforts, and optimize their outreach, by building on three core principles:
- Readers struggling to filter the growing quantity of published research
- Information supporting the ability of users to filter their searches, such as lay summaries and impact statements, which often exist but never made public
- Authors are in the best position to increase the awareness and impact of their work but don’t always know how
