Unleash your research paper

In 2014 Kudos emailed 1966 IUCr authors inviting them to become part of a pioneering scheme to help them promote their work to a wider community. Of the original emails sent over 50% were opened. The industry standard across all publishing partners taking part in the programme was 17%. This open-rate figure suggests a healthy interest in the programme and supports an earlier study by Kudos which showed 84% of researchers think more could be done to increase the impact and visibility of their work.

Over the coming months we will see a number of new features and updates to the existing service which essentially guides authors through the process of publicizing their work by drafting lay summaries and sharing these summaries on social media, email, blogs and other services.

At the beginning of the process, authors are now able to claim their articles easily through ORCID; if the user already has an ORCID ID they will be able to enter it at the end of the Kudos registration process, enabling the accurate matching of relevant publications from the researcher's ORCID ID.

Further enhancements will see authors being able to opt in to monthly emails detailing recent Kudos activity around their paper; for example, authors will be able to follow how many times their Kudos page has been viewed and how many times their paper has been downloaded.

Of those who opened the original email, a smaller number went on to explain one or more of their publications in Kudos by writing short lay summaries. Our aim is to encourage more of our authors who are keen to promote their work to engage with the Kudos platform and write lay summaries about their work, focusing on the importance of the research to the wider community and some of the eventual applications of the work.

Evidence has shown those papers with lay summaries and supplementary information are discovered more frequently and enjoy significantly higher usage.

Once an author has written a lay summary, the next stage is to enrich the entry with supplementary material and then share within our community. The Kudos platform gives authors the tools to be able to manage this entire process within the researcher's usual workflow. The author is then able to measure the results of their efforts through carefully created reporting pages.

The website is also being improved to offer guidance on 'What can I do?'  and 'Why should I do this?' to further encourage authors to actively participate in the promotion of their work.

An achievement bar to encourage authors to complete all the possible activities for their publication will be introduced and, along with the other enhancements mentioned in this article, a cleaner dashboard will make it easier for authors to take in data-at-a-glance and then drill down to the detail.

Over the course of 2015 more supporting material will be made available to authors via printed material distributed at conferences and rich media such as videos, podcasts and webinars to support authors in communicating their research to a wider, more interdisciplinary audience.

If you have any questions about Kudos please do not hesitate to get in touch.