PUBLISHER INFORMATION PACK
1 Recap: How do publishers benefit from Kudos?
Kudos drives additional usage of published content, which helps to minimize cancellations of library subscriptions. (Note
More usage
that Kudos never hosts full text but links to it via DOI).
We give publishers a unique, centralized view on how and where researchers are communicating about their work, and to what effect. Kudos is the only system to give visibility of researchers’ outreach via ‘closed’ channels such as email and Facebook; it also makes it much easier to identify outreach via open channels such as Twitter, because it does
Unique insight
not rely on following individual researchers, or on researchers using DOIs to communicate. By centralizing researchers’ management of their outreach, and incentivizing use of trackable URLs, Kudos can fill in the blanks and provide publishers with evidence as to which channels and activities can most help to increase the reach and impact of research.
Better author care
Our reports also help publishers to (for example) reshare social media posts, or recognize high-interest material that might benefit from wider PR / marketing activity. This helps to provide a better service to authors and supports the development of better relationships with researchers.
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2 Deep dive: Kudos for Publishers reporting
If we can identify active authors we can support them better and benefit more directly from their efforts
If more author communications were visible or measurable, we could provide better guidance to authors – and better evidence to motivate them to participate more actively in post-publication efforts to build usage
If we knew which authors were social media influencers, we could work more closely with them in a range of ways
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3 If we could save time in tracking authors’ communications, we would be able to support more authors with less resource
If we could benchmark engagement and results across journals, we could compare different author strategies and apply what we learn from our successes
If we were clearly making a difference to the impact of their work and therefore their own profiles / success, authors would continue to rank us highly as a publisher
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4 Partnerships Altmetric.com provide us with altmetric data which helps us show researchers the effect their efforts to explain and share have had on the attention their work is receiving in social media, traditional media, government policy and a range of other sources.
Crossref is our source for metadata such as title and authors. When users search Kudos they are effectively searching the Crossref dataset (in real time). Currently, content must have a Crossref DOI to be visible in Kudos.
EuropePMC links to Kudos plain language summaries from its publication records to help readers more easily understand the content they are looking at.
Researchers can connect their Kudos and ORCID accounts in order to automatically import their publications, both as a one-off event, and ongoing (each time they add something to ORCID it will be automatically added to Kudos). This saves time by reducing duplication of effort.
Jisc Collections have negotiated a standard licence and best pricing to help UK universities sign up to Kudos with minimal effort.
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5 We partner with Research Media for the creation of infographics that visually represent what a publication is about and why it is important. Research Media can also provide plain language explanations on behalf of researchers. These services can be sponsored by publishers to support or reward authors.
We partner with Research Square for the creation of video summaries for publications. Research Square can also provide plain language explanations on behalf of researchers. These services can be sponsored by publishers to support or reward authors.
We use Ringgold to help us affiliate researchers to institutions. When registering with Kudos, they begin typing their institution name and can then choose from options presented to them, based on Ringgold data. This enables us to roll up their activities for reporting to their institution. Thomson Reuters provide us with Times Cited counts from Web of ScienceÂŽ to help us show researchers the effect of their Kudos activities on this key metric. We are also partnering with Thomson Reuters to pilot the addition of plain language explanations via ScholarOne, to reduce effort for researchers.
Trend MD provide us with contextual recommendations to help readers navigate to other content in Kudos, or on TrendMD partner websites, that may be of interest to them.
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6 Spotlight on … ScholarOne A big focus for us, from our earliest days, is integration into existing researcher workflows, to minimize the effort involved in maximizing the audience for publications. We’re currently running a pilot with Thomson Reuters’ ScholarOne manuscript submission service to enable authors to add a plain language explanation of their work during the submission process. This new field (below) is live for our six pilot partners and there has been an encouraging level of uptake among authors. The plain language summaries they add are automatically passed to Kudos and stored as “pending”. If and when the article is published, Kudos will email the author to have them approve the explanation, which will then be made live and begin to contribute to increased visibility and impact; the author will also be invited at that point to further explain and share their work. We have already had interest in extending this capability to other manuscript submission systems and will progress with doing so once our initial pilot is complete.
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7 Beyond Metrics: how Kudos adds value Kudos is not about measuring performance;
it’s about improving performance. We provide metrics to help measure the impact that our system helps create. Many of our publisher and institutional partners obtain metrics from other sources (or directly from the same providers we use). How does Kudos add value for organizations already obtaining metrics elsewhere? Kudos adds value by enabling you not only to measure but also to improve. By funnelling researcher communications through this system, we are uniquely able to map efforts to share work (via email, social media, academic networks) against a range of publication metrics. Seeing the correlation between these two datasets is what motivates researchers to undertake more outreach; this benefits publishers, institutions and societies directly (improvement in the metrics) and indirectly (a growing dataset for analyzing correlations between actions and results, at the aggregate level).
When authors have explained and / or shared their publications in Kudos, the metrics tab for those publications will show them the result of their efforts (example above). The metrics tab includes both “communications metrics” from Kudos, and “publication metrics” sourced from our partners Altmetric and Thomson Reuters Web of Science®. These metrics, and the objectives they measure, can be loosely mapped along a spectrum based on the AIDA framework, Attention–Interest–Desire–Action.
ATTENTION
”
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Clicks
Downloads
“
DESIRE
ACTION Traditional media
Views
Mentions
Shares
INTEREST
Citations
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What is being measured?
Kudos metrics
Partner metrics
Attention
How many times the publication has been shared
Altmetric score
Interest
How many times the shared links have been clicked
Desire
How many times the Kudos pages have been viewed
Publisher downloads
Action
How many times someone has clicked through from the Kudos page to read the
Web of Science Times Cited
publication on the publisher site
All metrics are sourced in realtime as the page is loaded to give researchers the most up-to-date view of their performance. Metrics and communications are also graphed on a timeline (left) to help researchers clearly see how their efforts to explain / share correlate to growth in their metrics. By mapping activities and metrics in this way, rather than just focusing on metrics, Kudos uniquely enables researchers to understand how their communications efforts (and any supporting actions from their publisher, institution, society or funder) are shaping their performance. This both helps them to learn the most efficient way to communicate in future, and also motivates them to undertake more outreach because they can see worthwhile results from their efforts.
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9 Kudos in context No other service has been specifically designed to help researchers take control of the reach and impact of their publications, across all their publishers, and to help publishers and institutions understand the effect of this outreach. •
•
•
Profile sites such as ResearchGate enable researchers to share work, but within a closed community; metrics only reflect views within that group. Kudos helps you understand this sharing in the context of a wider range of communications and metrics. Sharing media such as Twitter or email enable researchers to communicate about their work, but they often don’t know how to track the effect of this. Kudos enables them to map responses from email or social sharing against measures such as downloads or citations. Metrics providers such as Google Scholar, Scopus, Plum or Altmetric enable researchers to list their work and see citations or altmetrics. Kudos adds insight by showing which of their communications activities are improving these metrics.
Downloads
Citations
Altmetrics
Publications
Communications
Without Kudos With Kudos: •
•
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Better understanding of the relationship between communications activities and publication metrics Improvement in those metrics thanks to more motivated researchers, and amplification by publishers, institutions, societies, funders
10 Integrating Kudos data into publisher websites
Plain language explanations and resource lists created within Kudos are licensed under CC-BY for reuse in other platforms, to maximize visibility. A simple HTML widget helps publishers and institutions, for example, to present Kudos data in their own system
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