Kudos is an online platform focused on helping you make your research more accessible to the public. Kudos lets you track the impact of your efforts on how often your paper is shared, how often it is viewed on Kudos, and its Altmetric score. If the publisher of your paper allows it, Kudos can also show you the number of times the full text of your paper has been downloaded. The service attracts about 1,000 new users every week and more than 300,000 publications have been claimed on Kudos.
Kudos allows you to create a profile page for each of your papers. One of the first things required for the profile of your paper is a summary of the most important findings in your work along with a simplified title. This makes your work easier to understand for both colleagues and members of the public. It also means that your academic paper will appear in general internet searches, which allows it to have potentially more impact. Kudos lets you enrich your work—you can add to the paper’s profile any presentations, blog posts, videos, or podcasts associated with the paper, for instance. Kudos generates a unique link to each paper’s page that allows you to track what happens after you’ve shared it via social media or email. Papers shared and explained using the Kudos platform have a 19% higher download rate than papers that were not enriched using this service.
Kudos and the University of Stockholm
Stockholm University is the newest institution to establish an academic partnership with Kudos. Since the service encourages making research more accessible by using jargon-free language, it is easy to see how it could be useful in improving research communication. Kudos pairs this effort with the ability to track the impact of the shared research which allows the publication impact to be quantified and linked to researchers’ efforts to communicate more effectively. The Research and Scholarly Communications Team Manager at Stockholm University, Thomas Neidenmark, said, “Kudos allows the university to successfully map the effects of research communications, thereby, providing insightful metrics that help to identify key trends among our researchers’ efforts. Kudos is a fundamental tool that helps us support our researchers and also truly understand how they promote their research to increase its impact.”
Kudos is free for researchers to use but institutions and publishers pay to access its insights. Kudos for Institutions has been designed to help universities and funders assess how researchers are using Kudos and what effect their use of the service has on the visibility and impact of their work. Currently, there are six other institutions involved in this academic partnership: Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Huddersfield, ETH Zϋrich, Hong Kong Baptist University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Birmingham.
Kudos has also welcomed partnerships with seven new publishers in 2017. The journals cover a range of disciplines including the life sciences, medicine, business, and geophysics. Jason Pointe, Publications Director at the International Research Society (one of the new publishing partners) describes the value in this new relationship: “Helping researchers undertake more proactive and better-targeted promotions of research is a service area that we anticipate will grow over the next few years. We are excited that by partnering with Kudos we are taking early steps to provide better support for our authors in this area.”
