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Saturday 30 November 2019

Research Skills Session 8: Avoid Scientific Misconduct

Ale Ebrahim, Nader (2019): Research Skills Session 8: Avoid Scientific Misconduct. figshare. Presentation. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.11300546.v1

Thursday 28 November 2019

Saturday 23 November 2019

Ale Ebrahim, Nader (2019): Research Skills Session 7: Indexing Research Tools. figshare. Presentation. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.10992596.v1



Friday 15 November 2019

My post on Linkedin reach to over 4.7k views


Getting Found: Building Visibility

Source:  https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/getting-found-staying-found/en/getting-found-visibility


Getting Found: Building Visibility

The success of your journal depends on developing a regular readership, who will become part of your scholarly community, cite your content in their own work, and tell others about the value of your publication. To do this, however, they will first need to be able to find you. This section examines a variety of ways to increase the “findability‟ of your journal through the use of commercial indexes, open databases, libraries, the media, professional networks, and professional recognition.

Journal Standards and Identifiers #

Contributed by Roger Gillis
There are several different standards and identifiers that are commonly used in academic publishing, and it is important for journal managers to become familiar with them and the role that they play in the operation of the journal. Although not exhaustive, this section will cover the most important ones: ISSN (International Standard Serial Number), Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID).

ISSNs #

An important way of helping people find your journal, and helping libraries and other organizations to make it discoverable, is to obtain an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). An ISSN is an eight-digit international standard, which allows for any serial publication (i.e. any publication that is published on a repeating or “serial” basis – journal, magazine, etc.), regardless of where it is published, the medium, language, or frequency of publication. ISSNs are widely used by libraries, citation indexes, and the publishing industry to uniquely identify and distinguish journals. They are often more important than the journal title itself for serials management because they provide a consistent identifier that helps to disambiguate like-titled journals.
Many external services, including indexing services such as the Directory of Open Access Journals, require that journals have an ISSN.
An ISSN can be obtained free of charge from a local ISSN Centre.
LAC ISSN An example of an ISSN application from Library and Archives Canada
ISSNs should be displayed on the journal’s website where it can be easily located, such as the footer or sidebar. If the publication has both a print and online edition there is typically one for each. In OJS, you will be asked to enter your ISSN as part of the Journal Settings. This is used for metadata purposes and is not shown to readers. To make the ISSN visible in the journal footer, type it into the footer text field in the Website Settings. To make the ISSN visible in the sidebar, create a custom block.
For the final published version of an article (e.g., a PDF galley), you may also want to include the ISSN, along with the journal name and DOI (see below), on the final page, in the footer of the PDF, or in another area of the layout version of the article itself. This is important, as PDFs can be downloaded, shared via email, and become disassociated with the journal. You always want to provide an easy and obvious link back to your journal.

Best Practices for ISSN Usage #

The ISSN International Organization has a list of recommendations for how best to apply ISSNs. Some of the more important principles include:
  • a new ISSN should be applied for when a journal’s title changes
  • a new ISSN should be applied for when a journal’s medium changes (from print to electronic)
  • a new ISSN should be applied for when a journal merges with another title

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) #

Contributed by Roger Gillis
The Digital Object Identifier or DOI is used to individually identify unique content and its location on the internet. They are typically applied to journal articles, but can be used for other content types such as datasets, images, or other supplementary materials added alongside articles. DOIs are what are called “persistent identifiers” — so even if the URL (Uniform Resource Locator - in other words, a website link) for a journal changes, the DOI remains the same and can be used to locate an article no matter where it moves on the web. DOIs are not only useful for readers trying to access articles, but are also used extensively by indexers, aggregators, and repositories, so it is important to take them seriously when trying to increase the visibility and impact of your journal.

The anatomy of a DOI #

A DOI consists of a series of characters divided into two parts – a prefix and a suffix, which are separated by a slash. The prefix uniquely identifies the registrant (i.e. the publisher) of the title, and the suffix identifies the specific object.
For example, the article “Health Care Professionals’ Opinions and Expectations of Clinical Pharmacy Services on a Surgical Ward” has the DOI 10.4212/cjhp.v69i6.1606
  • The “10.” part of the prefix identifies the DOI registry or the agency that issues the DOI numbers - in this example the agency is Crossref.
  • The characters “4212” in the prefix identify the registrant - in this case, the publisher is Multimed.
  • cjhp.v69i6.1606, the suffix, consists of several different parts, meant to distinguish the particular content.
  • “cjhp” is an abbreviation for the journal – The Canadian Journal of Hospital Pharmacy. This is a common feature of DOIs, where a journal will opt to be identified in a DOI by a standardized journal abbreviation. Multimed publishes multiple journals, and this helps to identify to which of its titles this article belongs.
  • “v69i6.1606” is the volume number of the article (69), then the issue number (6), and finally “1606” is a unique identifier for the individual article. For journals using OJS, the DOI will be automatically generated for each article.
DOIs are capable of identifying a journal, an individual issue or volume of a journal, an individual article in a journal, or can even go so granular as to identify a table or chart in a particular article. Not all journals use an abbreviation as part of the suffix. Many use a random number that is assigned by a DOI registration agency. However, using a journal abbreviation is a good way of allowing users to more quickly identify your journal.
You may often see DOIs communicated as URLs: “https://dx.doi.org/10.4212/cjhp.v69i6.1606.” This method can be used to obtain any article that has a DOI, by indicating the DOI following the “dx.doi.org.”

Setting up DOIs in OJS #

Journals publishing with OJS will find it very easy to work with DOIs. However, some initial setup steps are required. First, you will need to register with Crossref, which does require an annual fee. Further integration regarding OJS’ integration with Crossref can be found in the Crossref manual. You will then need to enable the DOI plugin within the OJS Journal Settings. Using DOIs and the DOI plugin provides you with the detailed steps you need to follow to configure DOIs for OJS.

Registering your DOIs in OJS #

Once you have joined Crossref and configured OJS to use DOIs, you will need to register your content as it is published. OJS can be used to manually deposit DOIs to Crossref, or configured to automatically deposit DOIs. A step-by-step guide to making DOI deposits to Crossref can be found in the Crossref manual.

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) #

Contributed by Jennifer Chan
The Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes one researcher or contributor from another, and is being increasingly adopted in workflows for grant and publication submission. The ORCID also serves as a means of ensuring that a researcher is accurately identified as a contributor for a particular work. This is particularly useful when authors have the same names. ORCID also ensures that works are properly attributed to authors who have undergone a legal name change.
An ORCID can be obtained by any researcher by registering on the ORCID website. Registering for an ORCID is free, and filling out a basic profile takes just a few minutes.
Here’s an example of an ORCID profile: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6192-8687 for researcher and PKP Director John Willinsky.
LAC ISSN
ORCID adoption is increasingly becoming a requirement among journal publishers and funders and many systems are using ORCIDs as a way to easily integrate author and/or contributor information into online submission forms. By identifying yourself with your ORCID in filling out a grant submission or manuscript submission form, the system that you’re entering can easily pull in all of the information contained in your ORCID profile into the registration form.
Note
Having a public profile also lends credibility to a researcher, allowing them to specify their education, employment, as well as published works in one central location. It also lends credibility to the journal, such as when you include the ORCID numbers for each of your editorial team members on your website. It is a valuable way to demonstrate that there are real people associated with your journal, not a list of made up names (which is seen as a sign of being a “predatory” journal).
Journal managers can encourage the use of ORCIDs by authors as a means of effectively collecting up-to-date information. While it might not be appropriate to enforce the use of ORCIDs, as not all authors will have them, it could be suggested to authors that they obtain an ORCID as part of the submission process and that it be required upon acceptance. This information, including a link to the ORCID registration form, could be part of the journal’s submission policy and featured on the journal’s website.
For journals using OJS, the ORCID can be entered as part of a user profile (under “Public” in OJS 3):
OJS ORCID profile
The OJS registration page can also include the option for new users to use their ORCID when registering:
OJS ORCID registration
This will automatically pull their personal data (first name, last name, email, etc.) from the ORCID database into the OJS registration form.

Search Engines #

Contributed by Roger Gillis
Despite the existence of specialized research databases, many researchers begin their online investigation in a search engine, like Google. Ensuring your journal is well placed within search engine search results is therefore an important responsibility for journal managers.

Search Engine Optimization #

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of increasing the visibility of a website, webpages, or website content (such as your journal articles) within search engines. SEO is an important consideration for online journals seeking to draw visitors to their sites. When a researcher does a search on Google that is relevant to your subject area, you want your articles to appear as close to the top of their result list as possible. SEO can help to put you higher on that list.
Most visits to websites are driven by search engines. Two major search engines make up more than 95% of all search traffic in the United States: Google and Yahoo!-Bing alliance. For most countries outside of the US, over 80% of search traffic comes solely from Google (with some exceptions, including Russia and China (Fishkin & Moz, 2015).
Search engines provide two important functions: they return results relevant to the search query and they return results often according to popularity of the websites. Much of what is written about SEO pertains to commercially-oriented businesses and organizations seeking the maximum exposure for their brands and products via search engines. Some of these organizations have deep pockets and have invested considerable time, effort, and money on SEO. For those with limited or no budget and with highly specialized content, there are still some simple steps you can take to raise your visibility.
While most modern search engines are fairly adept at indexing sites, there are a number of things that you can do to rank higher in search engine results and draw more readers to your journal.
Some of the best ways to ensure good SEO are based on more general principles related to modern websites and design:
  • Make your website easy to use, navigate, and understand
  • Provide direct, actionable information relevant to a user’s search query
  • Deliver high quality, legitimate, credible content
Source: (Fishkin & Moz, 2015).
Used appropriately, OJS can help you adhere to these principles, provide effective SEO for journals, and help you raise your visibility on the web.

Practical steps and technical issues #

Search engines work by sending out automated “crawlers” across the web. These “crawlers” need to be able to visit your site and index every page. Here are some practical steps and considerations you can use in order to help crawlers index your site:
  • Search engines have an easier time indexing material that is in HTML format. For OJS journals, your site is in HTML and will present no problems for crawlers. Although more resource-intensive, you may wish to consider publishing HTML versions of your articles, as PDFs are typically not as indexable. However, keep in mind that steps can be taken to make PDFs more accessible to search engines. See: 10 Tips to make your PDFs SEO friendly
  • If you use images on your journal website or in your articles, it is advisable to use the “alt” attribute to provide search engines with a text-based description of images. This also improves the overall accessibility of your journal website, assisting users with screen readers to understand the contents of an image. For OJS journals, you can add alt tags for the information you enter as a part of the setup process.
Entering Alternate Text in OJS 3
Similarly, video and audio content is typically not indexed well by search engines, so providing things like transcripts can go a long way in making this content more accessible and indexed by search engines, as well as usable by a broader spectrum of users, such as those with hearing or visual disabilities.

Usability and User experience #

Another important way to enhance your SEO is by having a modern site that provides a positive user experience:
“Usability and user experience are second order influences on search engine ranking success. They provide an indirect but measurable benefit to a site’s external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality. This is called the “no one likes to link to a crummy site” phenomenon.” (Fishkin & Moz, 2015, p. 27).
For OJS users, designing an appropriate site can be achieved through the new OJS theming capabilities. In particular, OJS 3 offers significant improvements when it comes to user experience and usability, having undergone significant user testing in its development. For guidance on how to customize the look and feel of the OJS software, please consult the PKP Theming Guide.

Getting Found and Getting Social #

With the rise of social media, the sharing of content of websites (including academic articles) via social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter has also arisen as a factor considered as part of SEO. While search engines may treat socially shared links differently than other web content, it is a factor that is taken into consideration when ranking search results (Fishkin, & Moz, 2015). Google, for example, takes into account different social sharing factors when ranking its search results.
For advice on developing a social media presence for your journal, see the section in this guide on using Social Media for your Journal. Publicizing your publication and its contents through social media will help boost your search engine rankings.

Linking up #

Links aren’t everything in SEO, but search professionals attribute a large portion of the engines’ algorithms to link-related factors. Through links, engines can not only analyze the popularity of websites and pages based on the number and popularity of pages linking to them, but also metrics like trust, spam, and authority.” (Fishkin, & Moz p.30)
Linking on the web works in two directions: links to your journal, including to your articles, from other sites, and links you include on your journal to other sites. Both play an important role in SEO. The more sites that link to your journal, the more likely your journal is to rank higher in search engine rankings. Here are some things you can do to help get more links to your journal:
  1. Hire a professional graphic designer to create a journal logo that others could use to link to your site.
  2. Have other journals, conferences, or associations in your discipline link to your site, in exchange for you linking to them.
  3. Ask your professional association, universities, libraries, academics working in your discipline, or other related organizations in your field to provide a link to your site on their web pages.
  4. Get articles from your journal featured (and therefore linked) in a news story, media release, or blog. Media stories also tend to reach larger audiences, ensuring that your journal website is noticed by more readers than usual.
Getting linked to often comes about through letting others know about your journal, and may not require any additional effort. Be wary of mass solicitation in attempting to get others to link to your site, however, as this is often seen as spam and can undermine the credibility of your journal as well as negatively impact your SEO.
Linking from your journal to other relevant sites is another important way to increase your SEO. Relevance is key here, as search engines are smart enough to recognize if you fill your site with unrelated links in an obvious attempt to raise your SEO illegitimately. Some simple ways to increase the relevant links on your website include:
  1. Include links to profile pages at the home institutions or professional websites for all of your editorial team and authors. See this example for PKP Director, Dr. John Willinsky. This not only adds many relevant links to your journal website, but also significantly boosts its credibility by demonstrating that these are all real people. A common practice of predatory journals is to make up editorial board members, or to list people without their knowledge, so this is a good way to show you are a legitimate journal.
  2. Include links to the ORCIDs of your editorial team and authors. Similar to the item above, it increases relevant links and increases your credibility.
  3. Add DOI links to as many items in the references of your articles as possible. This will further boost both your relevant linking and your demonstration of being a professional publication. In OJS, this can be done by adding links to the reference list entries in the PDF galleys, the HTML galleys, and on the article abstract page.
  4. Create a page for relevant journals, associations, and other organizations closely associated with your journal. For example the Canadian Journal of Sociology would likely link to the Canadian Sociological Association.
  5. Add a relevant Twitter feed to the homepage or sidebar of your journal, displaying the latest 5 or 6 links to the latest tweets from a related hashtag.

Evaluating Your SEO #

One of the easiest ways to determine how your publication might be faring in search engines is to do some tests for keywords and phrases. Try searching for your journal name or an article title in a search engine like Google and see your journal site is being indexed.
There are a wide variety of tools that can assist you with Search Engine Optimization and can help you understand the traffic for your website:
  • Google Webmaster tools and the Google Search Console can help you understand how your site is performing, and provide many tools to help improve your search ranking and performance.
  • Google analytics or Piwik can help you understand your web traffic. Both have OJS plugins and are popular, free, and effective ways to understand and report on traffic to your journal website.
  • Moz Link Explorer is another tool that allows you to analyze the sites that link to your website.
SEO can be intimidating and take time, practice, and experience to do properly. But by following some of the advice outlined in this section, you can take steps towards ensuring that your journal will be highly visible in the search engines used by researchers interested in your content and understand the web traffic reaching your website.

Indexes and Databases #

Indexes and databases are online, searchable collections of information. Sometimes they only include metadata (author names, article titles, subjects, keywords, etc.) and sometimes they contain the full-text. Some of them are freely available, and some of them require individual or institutional subscriptions to access. They are typically curated for relevance and quality and will have some set of criteria for what is included. For your journal, three important questions to ask are: is this database relevant to my journal? What are the criteria for being included? How do I submit my journal’s content?

An introduction to indexing services #

Contributed by Andrea Kosavic
Indexing services ensure that scholarly content is discoverable and accessible to the broadest possible audience. It is strategic for a journal’s content to be visible where researchers in the field are conducting their research, and this is achievable by targeting indexes favoured by scholars in a given area of study. This includes any number of open and commercial indexing services and universal indexes like Google Scholar.
Indexes can broadly be categorized as commercial and open. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and are explored in further detail in the sections that follow.
Those seeking maximum exposure for journals are advised to pursue inclusion in as many indexes as is appropriate and possible. It is prudent to bear in mind the significant documented advantages of publishing in an open access format in terms of usage and impact. These advantages are magnified by indexing with open indexes.
It is strategic to target indexes for your journal that address the needs of the scholarly community engaging with your publication. These vary from one discipline to the next. Journal editors are advised to consult Ulrichs Web Global Serials Directory, a commercial service for which institutional libraries may have a subscription. A common strategy is to look up related journals in your subject area within Ulrichs and explore their abstracting & indexing affiliations. This figure shows a tab that be expanded within a respective journal’s description page within Ulrichs.
Ulrichs A screenshot from Ulrichs Web Global Serials Directory
This provides an ideal starting point for identifying services to approach. SPARC also provides a broader list of indexes to consider.

The indexing process #

Different indexes will have varying criteria for including your publication’s content in their index. Depending on the index, the indexing process may require manual intervention. As an example, regular exports of metadata from your journal, sometimes in particular formats, may be required.
Some organizations may provide guidelines and their requirements for publishers providing content to them. This can include (but is not limited to):
  • Delivery mechanism (e.g., via File transfer protocol or web upload)
  • Acceptable file formats (e.g., PDF, HTML)
  • Provision of metadata – (e.g., JATS/NLM XML)
Also, bear in mind that some indexes may require that you meet certain criteria before being included in their indexes, such as reaching a minimum number of published articles or publishing a certain category of scholarly outputs (e.g., articles vs. reviews).
In OJS, there are many data export utilities, such as plugins that export to DOAJ and PubMed, that will facilitate providing some of the necessary contents and metadata to certain indexes.
Most often, when an independently published publication such as a journal seeks to partner with a commercial indexing service for inclusion with a particular commercial database or index, they will often be presented with a legal agreement.
If at all possible, it is advisable to seek legal counsel, or advice from those knowledgeable in electronic licensing, to review this document to ensure that it is in the best interest of your journal/publication.
Some things to be wary of:
If the commercial index asks for “exclusive” rights to index your publication, this is problematic. This means that you may not be free to provide other entities (commercial or noncommercial) with the ability to index your content. Granting the indexing organization “nonexclusive” rights is much better because it frees your journal to seek out other indexing partnerships and not be limited to indexing in just one database or with one commercial vendor.
The amount of time between the provision of your content to the vendor (e.g., PDF files and article metadata) may vary from one subject index to the next. The vendor will typically provide some mechanism for correction of errors in the guidelines for providing them with content.
It is important to note that commercial products are not Open Access products. They are designed to provide access to a limited audience, and as such limit your publication’s exposure. It is important to broaden one’s indexing strategy beyond commercial indexes and take advantage of multiple different indexes – both commercial and noncommercial – to seek the maximum exposure of your journal or publication to a wide variety of audiences.

Open indexes #

Open indexes are similar to commercial indexes in that they aggregate citation metadata into a single searchable database or listing. The main types of open indexes include directories and search engines. One of the principle advantages of open indexes is that they are freely available online for anyone to use, including individual readers and libraries.
Many open indexes are also more willing to include content from new journals, placing more emphasis on the quality of your content and your open access policy than on a large archive of published material. In addition, your content can often be included more quickly in open indexes. Open indexes are becoming increasingly important to researchers. While they may not yet have the same prestige or influence as some of the commercial indexes, becoming part of one or more of them will significantly raise your journal’s profile with a wider audience of readers.
Like commercial indexes, open indexes are also looking for high-quality content, peer review, compatible subject matter, and evidence of stability and sustainability. Some, however, may be willing to accept submissions from new journals lacking an established history of publication. If you do not know the best open indexes for your journal, contact your library. They will be able to guide you in the appropriate direction.

PKP Index #

Contributed by Andrea Pritt
The Public Knowledge Project Index (PKP Index) is an openly available database of articles, books, and conference proceedings based on journals or other publications that use PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS), Open Monograph Press (OMP), and Open Conference Systems (OCS) software applications. The PKP Index uses the Open Harvester System (OHS) software and hosts thousands of publications. It is not subject specific. The PKP Index is a good choice for your first index and is one way that you can increase the visibility of your journal.
In order to be included within the PKP Index, your journal must include at least one published item. Tests, demonstrations, and empty installations will be rejected. You’ll need to wait until you’ve started publishing before you can sign up. This will be true of most indexes.

Registering for the PKP Index #

To register for the PKP Index, go to the registration page for the PKP Index, follow the instructions, and ensure that you adhere to the requirements noted on the registration page.
Processing the registration might take a few days to a week or so, as PKP staff approve the registrations. Check back after a short time, and click on “Browse” to see an alphabetical listing of all publications that are included in the PKP Index and you should see your publication appear. Future issues will be automatically included in the PKP Index; no further action is required on your part.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) #

Contributed by Andrea Pritt
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online, community-curated list of open access journals, which aims to be the starting point for researchers looking for quality peer-reviewed open access resources. As stated on the DOAJ website: “the aim of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals, thereby promoting their increased usage and impact”(Directory of Open Access Journals [DOAJ], 2018). The DOAJ’s mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language.”DOAJ, “Mission” 2018. As of this writing, DOAJ claims to have approximately 11,000+ journals included as part of its index (DOAJ, 2018).
Having your journal included in DOAJ can have significant benefits for your journal’s reputation, usage, and impact. The DOAJ has established itself as a key index for high-quality open access journals worldwide. It is becoming the defacto “white list” of non-predatory open access journals, so you definitely want to be part of it. Including your journal in DOAJ will bring significant visibility to your journal – libraries include DOAJ journals as part of their catalogs, which will mean that your journal’s content will be included when thousands of students, faculty, and other researchers are looking for content. DOAJ is also a very common resource for authors looking for open access journals to publish in, which will also serve to raise the profile of your journal and assert its legitimacy. To help authors identify potential journals for submission by subject, DOAJ includes a “Browse Subjects” feature.
DOAJ determines quality and acceptance into the directory through an extensive application process. In March 2014, new criteria guidelines were established. DOAJ provides guidance for journals for its application process. Journals may also be removed from the index if they do not meet DOAJ’s requirements. More information about inclusion and removal of journals can be found at the DOAJ FAQ list. For guidance in applying for inclusion in DOAJ, please see [Appendix: DOAJ] (https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/getting-found-staying-found/en/getting-found-appendix-1-DOAJ).

Google Scholar #

Contributed by Roger Gillis and Andrea Kosavic
Google Scholar is a search engine for scholarly literature that has grown quite popular since it launched in 2004. It provides a simple search interface allowing users to search across many disciplines and sources for scholarly material such as articles, theses, books, abstracts, and court opinions and includes material from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities, and other web sites. Google Scholar “About” 2018.
Google scholar is used by many people to access scholarly research, including researchers themselves, so having your journal included in its search results can provide great exposure for your journal.
OJS interacts very well with Google Scholar. In fact, Google Scholar recommends OJS as a publishing system for journals seeking to get their articles discovered online. In order to expedite indexing in Google Scholar you can also use Google Webmaster Tools.
Google Scholar has as part of its criteria, that your content feature primarily scholarly articles. Additionally, at a minimum, the abstracts will need to be made freely available in order that they may be viewed in Google Scholar search results.
To be crawled by Google Scholar, the articles that your journal publishes need to be in either the HTML or PDF format. If publishing in PDF, the text must be searchable. To configure searchable text in OJS ensure that the appropriate search settings are enabled in the OJS config.inc.php file. You can read more about this in the Administrator’s Guide.
Google Scholar requires that particular technical specifications be followed to ensure proper indexing. OJS users can take comfort in the knowledge that Google Scholar recognizes OJS as meeting its specifications but should take care to read the indexing guidelines to ensure their content is optimized for inclusion.

PubMed/Medline inclusion resources #

Contributed by Andrea Kosavic
PubMed is one of the most recognized and respected open indexes. As with commercial indexes, PubMed collects metadata from various journals (all in the field of life sciences and biomedicine) and combines them into a single searchable database.
Journals in life sciences, medicine, or biomedicine fields that use the Open Journal Systems platform should endeavour to be included in PubMed. To facilitate this, OJS includes an exporting tool, which produces a file of all of your journal’s metadata suitable for sending directly to PubMed. Some open indexes, such as BioMed Central or Chemistry Central, only include their own published content. For journals not published by BioMed Central or Chemistry Central, it is not an option. Examples of other open indexes include Agricola from the U.S. National Agriculture Library and ERIC(https://eric.ed.gov/) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.
Further reading: Medline journal selection FAQ: Medline online application: PubMed Central FAQ for publishers: PubMed Central online application:

Knowledge Bases and ERM #

Contributed by Andrea Kosavic
A knowledge base in the context of electronic resource management refers to a database of metadata about online journals and other online formats. The information about online journals in a knowledge base is frequently organized by publisher/provider and lists of related titles or titles in a product and is used to facilitate user-facing discovery services such as:
  • Linking between indexes and content platforms (link resolving)
  • Maintaining lists of journal titles that are searchable, are browsable, and that link to publisher platform
  • Populating unified / federated indexes of content for “discovery” by specific communities of users
Knowledge bases and link resolvers, journal title lists, and discovery tools may be more or less interoperable, and may be open source projects, but are more frequently developed and maintained by commercial service providers. In either event, representation of title-level metadata in a knowledge base is prerequisite to link resolving, presence in user-facing journal lists, and indexing in discovery tools such asSummon, EBSCO discovery service, and Primo.
Frequently, participation in open indexes such as the PKP Index or the DOAJ (as detailed above) will also achieve representation even in commercial knowledge bases, which often seek to include Open Access materials as value-added resources. However, the completeness and currency of open access title lists in knowledge bases varies, and it may be necessary to contact a knowledge base provider to request inclusion or an update to a title list that should include a journal but does not.

Commercial indexes and aggregators #

Contributed by Andrea Kosavic and Roger Gillis
Commercial indexes and aggregators are collections of journal citation details (such as author names, article title, journal title, volume and issue numbers, abstracts, etc. – also known as “metadata”) maintained in a central, searchable database. As commercial services, these indexes are only available with a paid subscription and are often accessed by readers through their library. Significant portions of many academic library budgets go toward making these commercial products freely available to their faculty and students. One of the most influential indexes is Clarivate Analytics (previously Thomson Reuters) Web of Science.
Some indexes may be focused on a single discipline, such as PsycInfo for psychology, whereas others are multidisciplinary, such as Elsevier’s Scopus. Some combine information from hundreds of journals, and others may only include the metadata from a few. Some indexes are produced by scholarly societies or nonprofit organizations, and others are produced by for-profit businesses. Commercial indexes are often an important way for readers to find your content, and getting included in one or more of them is important for your journal’s success.

Listing your journal with commercial indexes #

How you get journal included in a subject index will vary from one subject database to the next. It’s possible that your journal may be approached by commercial index organizations such as ProQuest and EBSCO.
One important consideration is the ownership of intellectual property. Often, part of the agreements that some commercial organizations will ask journals to sign will include a clause requiring that the journals have the rights to be able to grant the right for the index to include the journal’s content as part of the database. In order to do this, the journal must have had an appropriate policy that has assigned the journal the appropriate rights to redistribute this content. Journal managers may wish to consult the following document, which provides guidance for working with commercial aggregators.
The actual steps involved to getting material included in commercial databases will differ. For commercial indexes (and many other indexes) they will make information available on how to go about getting indexed as a part of their databases. For example:

Web of Science inclusion resources #

Contributed by Andrea Kosavic
Web of Science is another popular commercial index that many journals wish to get indexed in. Editors will first want to consult the master journal list to see if the journal is included, and ensure that their publication is in alignment with the selection criteria.
Web of Science Resources

Promotion and Marketing #

Contributed by Suzanne Jay and Kevin Stranack
Promoting and marketing your journal to propspective audiences can be a great way to raise the profile of your journal. There are a variety of ways to go about this, including via social media, as well as getting media attention for research that your journal publishes.

Social media #

Social media is a valuable way to reach specific audiences to introduce and amplify the work of your journal’s contributors. It can also supplement your communication with contributors by providing a channel that acknowledges and promotes their work. Your chosen platform should apply the established brand of your journal (for example, your journal’s logo, wordmark, or colours), as this consistency will support perception of credibility.

Managing multiple platforms #

While most platforms are available for use without fees, effective use requires a sustained investment of attention to plan and maintain. Tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. can help you target an audience, but there is huge competition and lots of “noise.”
Building an engaged social media following can absorb as many resources as you are willing to commit. Your social media plan should include recruiting the support of those who have already developed a credible profile and following among the target audience. Social media management tools bring multiple social media accounts into a single platform to facilitate scheduling of content, supervising contributors, and tracking metrics. It is worthwhile to determine your needs and capacities to select a suitable management tool. Few are free, most are subscription based. Examples include Hootsuite or Social Pilot.

Building a team #

It is common for scholarly social networking platforms, such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, or Humanities Commons, to provide social features to network users by encouraging them to follow one another and to receive alerts when a followed person publishes. Educating authors about these features can increase their findability and also increase visits to your journal.
Your authors and editorial team are the logical “core” of a journal’s social media team. Useful things they can do to bolster your publication’s social media presence include the following:
  • Like, follow and share the content on the journal’s social media platforms.
  • Follow and promote each other as co-contributors to the journal on their personal or professional social media accounts. For example, point to articles published in the same issue of a journal: “Appreciate the methodology used by Dr. Chao in this article just published in [Journal Name with URL]”
  • A member of the editorial team can build and oversee a team of staff or volunteers to populate your journal’s social media platforms with content that is vetted before publication. Online management tools such as Hootsuite can help to streamline this process.

The news release #

The inverted pyramid style media release remains a valid tool for getting information to key individuals and organizations about content published in your journal. The method of delivery has changed, but the media release is still a valuable way to pitch a story to a reporter who is almost always a layperson. We may consume media on different platforms, but commercial or traditional media remain the producers of trusted content that is shared across new platforms. Videos from TV news, stories from newspaper websites and blogs, and audio from radio stations continue to be widely shared on the news media. These traditional media still confer credibility and reliability to sources. Reporters and their editors still turn to news releases as a way to discover stories. With some exceptions, a news story shared on social media about something in your journal will be perceived with a higher degree of credibility among a wider (though shallower) audience than if you simply post a link to the information on your social media platform.

Reasons to use media releases #

It might be tempting to rely on an article abstract in place of a media release, but abstracts, regardless of effort to use “plain language,” perform a different function and are not accessible to a general audience. The decision to create and use a media release will depend on your journal’s public profile needs and how important it is that your contributors’ work is noticed and by whom.
Press release
Image source: Air Force Departmental Publishing Office (AFDPO) [Public domain], via [Wikimedia Commons]. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)-Check)
It is increasingly common that funders require projects to include a knowledge translation or mobilization component. Getting a story into the local community paper may or may not fulfill this requirement, but an article or mention in an industry magazine such as Nature, Aviation Week, or CPA Magazine might. News reporters rarely spend time researching stories on their own. They rely on trusted sources. Unless they are assigned to a beat, which is rare now, most reporters will need explicit guidance to understand your subject area. Reporters rely on media releases to understand and shape a story. Media releases point out the relevance of an article to the media outlet’s audience, position an author as an expert and invite reporters to connect with the expert. Keep in mind that reporters may not be able to read the original journal article and may not have the necessary disciplinary background to interpret it appropriately.

Factors to consider in developing a news release #

  • Who is your audience and what do you want them to do? Example: If your journal is for perfusionists and you want them to subscribe or read your new journal about perfusion, consider a media release to The Canadian Society of Clinical Perfusion, not The Globe and Mail
  • Are you the person who should write the release? An editor may have the support of an institution’s communications staff who will have the skill set and contacts to help you get the story out. In this situation, an editor serves the role of guide and educator to the communications person who is usually not an expert in your field. The editor may also be an important go-between with the author(s).
  • A modern media release can be multi-media, incorporating video, animation, live links and text.
  • The findings or content of specific articles is much more interesting than the fact you have published a new issue. So each issue offers many promotional opportunities as long as each is tailored to specific audiences.
  • It may be a better use of resources to recruit others who already have a following to promote the content in your journal than to devote resources to building a following from scratch. The support of influencers who use social media will also help build a journal’s following.
  • Social media can amplify your story, but the substantive content usually resides elsewhere such as a news website, institutional blog, or your journal’s announcements page.
  • Journal content can have a long life. Consider promoting articles published several years earlier, especially if an article can fill an information vacuum for something current.

Further Reading: #

Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) Webinar Series: ORCID in Publishing Workflows
Creating Accessible PDFs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex-XdcO7hjk)
PDF SEO best practices

Wednesday 13 November 2019

Research Skills Session 6: Read a Paper

Ale Ebrahim, Nader (2019): Research Skills Session 6: Read a Paper. figshare. Presentation. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.10302095.v1 




Tuesday 12 November 2019

Maximizing dissemination and engaging readers: The other 50% of an author's day: A case study

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/leap.1251

Maximizing dissemination and engaging readers: The other 50% of an author's day: A case study

First published: 12 July 2019

Abstract


Key points


  • Dissemination should be the other 50% of what authors do: being read and having impact will not happen by itself.
  • Authors can influence discovery and readership through owned media – i.e. their own communication activities.
  • Earned media – i.e. when influencers write about your work – is key to reaching larger and more diverse audiences.
  • There is plenty of data for tracking engagement and use of articles, but it is scattered across multiple tools and providers and can be misleading or even incorrect.
  • Listservs can have higher engagement than modern, ‘cool’, social networking tools.

INTRODUCTION

It takes much time and effort to write a paper – but how much time and effort do authors put in to finding readers? In this case study, I explain why I decided to devote an equivalent amount of time and effort into finding and then engaging with my audience. Drawing on available data for three papers I published in 2017, 2018, and 2019, I describe how I promoted them, what happened, and what I learned. You will learn about the Conversion Funnel and how tools like Kudos and Altmetric can help drive and track your audience through its four layers: awareness, interest, desire, and action (downloading and reading). You will learn the difference between owned and earned media and why finding influencers and riding waves can be so important. I also identify areas inside the funnel where an author is dependent on others, lacks control, or where data is missing, each of which makes influencing the click‐through rate more difficult. The case study ends with a set of 10 lessons learned.

WHY ACTION IS NEEDED

The urban legend that many academic papers go unread beyond their authors' ‘collegiate bubbles’ (Meho, 2007) was seemingly validated in 2014 when the World Bank reported that a third of its own papers were never downloaded (Doemeland & Trevio, 2014). However, as with most urban legends, the data tells another story. The World Bank's authors drew on data from a defunct repository and so missed data from a new one which showed that all reports were downloaded (C. Rossel, personal communication, May 2014). Ironically, the fuss that greeted the World Bank paper certainly drove its readership beyond its authors' bubble: it has been downloaded more than 8,000 times and, as of 19 April 2019, has an Altmetric score that tops 200. However, an essential question remains: how can authors boost their audience beyond their immediate peer group?
Whilst a paywall might be a commonly cited barrier to being read (e.g. O'Brien, 2016), others exist, such as arcane and foreign language, discoverability, and even the comparative difficulty in using journals compared with other media (Waller & Knight, 2012). Plainly, you can only download what you know exists, so discoverability must be a primary barrier, especially because paywalls are now relatively easy to skirt with tools like Unpaywall (https://unpaywall.org/) able to find free versions of many paywalled articles, and as a last resort, there is what I like to refer to as the ‘Scottish Service’ (Note: According to theatrical superstition, speaking the name of Shakespeare's play Macbeth invites disaster, so thespians refer to it as the Scottish Play and the lead character as the Scottish King. Rather than invite disaster on our house, perhaps it would be safer to refer to SciHub as the Scottish Service (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scottish_Play).) aka, SciHub.
Writing a paper is a significant investment in time (e.g. Margaryan, 2011), and authors, their employers, and funders will want a return on this effort. Of authors in the USA, 70% say they want readers beyond their sub‐discipline, and just under half say they want to be read by policymakers (Blankstein & Wolff‐Eisenberg, 2019). So perhaps it is no surprise that some 300,000 scholars – around 10% of researchers in developed economies (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development[ OECD], 2019) – have created accounts on a tool, Kudos (www.growkudos.com), which aims to help researchers communicate more effectively about their work (C. Rapple, personal communication, May 2019). Since January 2018, 39% of those who have registered with Kudos have used its tools to promote their articles, encouraged perhaps because using Kudos to promote scholarly papers leads to more attention, and there is evidence that downloads grow at a rate that is 23% faster than when it is not used (Erdt, Aung, Aw, Rapple, & Theng, 2017). However, these are early days, a recent review of using social media to drive downloads and citations seems to show little effect on these metrics (Davis, 2019) – but perhaps there are other objectives than simply boosting readership.
Take for example the University of Manchester. The university implements a protocol that uses Kudos, The Conversation (http://theconversation.com/global), and Altmetric (www.altmetric.com), in addition to other University of Manchester services, to boost access to its authors' articles and connect its researchers with policymakers and influencers (UoMLibResearch, 2019).
I work at the OECD, an institution that helps governments develop policies to improve the lives of their citizens. The help primarily comes in the form of advice based on the research conducted by the OECD at the behest of its funders. Plainly, if the OECD's research findings and knowledge are left unread, the OECD would be failing in its mission. This is why Angel Gurría, the OECD's Secretary‐General, often reminds staff that ‘dissemination is the other 50% of what we do’. For him, simply doing the research and sharing the results with governments and funders is not enough; to fulfil its mission, the OECD needs to win its fair share (or more!) of an ever‐larger audience's attention. This is captured by the OECD's Publishing Policy in the form of a simple objective: to ‘maximize dissemination’.
So, when I turned my hand to being an author, I thought I would follow our Secretary‐General's injunction and spend as much time promoting my articles as I had spent researching and writing them: to see if I could maximize dissemination. This is my story of the ‘other 50% of being an author’, my story on trying to find readers beyond my bubble.

HOW TO ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE

The other 50%: Preparation

Just as there are tools and techniques to make writing easier, so are there tools (e.g. Kudos, Altmetric, Plum Analytics (https://plumanalytics.com/), and various social media channels) and techniques (e.g. a conversion funnel) for boosting readership.
Kudos was developed to help researchers promote their publications and track their efforts in doing so. It invites authors to create a shareable summary ‘publications page’, where the work's core messages are presented in a non‐technical way along with a link to the original work on the publisher's website. (Kudos calls this a ‘publications page’, but I will refer to it as the article summary page to distinguish it from the article landing page on the publisher's website that hosts the actual publication.) It offers tools that enable authors to create tagged links that can be embedded in ‘owned media’ messages and content (see Box 1 for definition). A dashboard gives daily reports on the number of times the tagged links send traffic to the Kudos‐hosted article summary page, so the success of each owned media effort can be assessed. The dashboard also displays the publication's Altmetric ‘doughnut’, which leads to its detailed Altmetric dashboard.

BOX 1. Owned, earned, and paid media

Owned media is when you post content on communication channels that are under your control. These could be websites, blogs, social media, or email.
Earned media is when other people (often known as ‘influencers’) are talking about your work on their websites, social media, and other channels. It includes traditional or mainstream media and things like letters to the editor, book reviews, and citations, as well as word of mouth (e.g. mentions at conferences).
Paid media is when you pay to have your work advertised in both traditional and online media. This would include promoted items on social media channels and in search results.
Altmetric is a tool that enables researchers to track the reach and influence of their publications in ‘earned media’ (see Box 1), specifically mainstream media, on social media, blogs and websites, in reference management tools, Wikipedia, and in policy documents. Those with access to its premium features can track citations in journals and dig back through a publication's impact history. It works in almost real time, so it gives an author the chance to join in online conversations that they might otherwise have missed, for example, Twitter threads and blog postings.
Using both tools together meant that I could track the impact of my own promotion efforts and see where one of my papers was being talked about by my audience. The latter was important in helping me to engage with my readers, to discover and join in conversations with people who had actually read my papers.

Funnelling conversions to drive readership

The Purchase Funnel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_funnel) is a long‐established marketing principle. Originally coined in 1898 by E. St. Elmo Lewis, it comprises four steps to making a sale: awareness, interest, desire, and action. Being an analogue process, its lack of reliable, affordable, data points brought about that oft‐quoted marketer's quip about not knowing which half of one's advertising spend is wasted (Bullmore, 2013).
The arrival of e‐commerce, with its extensive digital exhaust, meant that the number of people clicking from one step to the next could be tracked cheaply and easily, and the ‘conversion rate’ (the percentage of people clicking from one funnel step to the next) could be calculated. Access to these data has revolutionized marketing, and any good marketer will now know the return on every advertising dollar spent. However, as an online marketers' objective is not always a sale (they might be after your vote), the digital funnel is known as the Conversion Funnel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_funnel).
For an author in scholcom, the objective is to be read (and, probably, cited), so this forms the lower, ‘action’, part of the funnel. To get there, a reader must first be made aware that an article exists through search, owned, and earned media and have their interest stimulated by a summary page or abstract such that they desire to seek the full text and act by downloading and reading the work (Fig. 1). Not everyone will pass right through the funnel; a percentage will be lost at every step. So, maximizing dissemination requires boosting the number being introduced at the top and, using traffic data, removing frictions to reduce the drop‐out percentages at each step through the funnel.
image
Conversion funnel – formally published journal article with summary page.
Source: Author's illustration.
Understanding and exploiting the Conversion Funnel is fundamental to any promotion strategy designed to boost readership:
  • Search is not just how findable your content is to general search engines; it is dependent on the way your publisher, and partners such as Kudos or ResearchGate, prepare and present your content on and to academic discovery services (where a majority of scholarly searches take place; Blankstein & Wolff‐Eisenberg, 2019). The best way authors can boost their chances of appearing in search results is to post a variety of outputs (e.g. video, slides, blog posts) with simple, engaging titles in addition to the formal work. Your article's title should be clear and to the point, and all relevant keywords should be woven into its abstract.
  • Owned media is in the hands of the author (and potentially their employer, funder, or other partner) and should be used in the long run to drive awareness among the author's own network. This is where the author has the most leeway to act in the pursuit of readers.
  • Earned media can be leveraged by asking colleagues to send messages via their social media accounts but comes into its own when ‘influencers’ choose to review, comment, react, mention, and cite a published work and/or its author. Authors can seek out influencers, especially those beyond their own bubble, for example by sending out a press release.
  • A web page summarizing the article (ideally presented in an accessible and non‐technical way) could be hosted on the author's personal, departmental, and/or institution website; on the author's page on collaboration networks like ResearchGate or LinkedIn; and on the summary page of tools such as Kudos. To maximize discoverability, an author would use all of these places. The objective is to pique the interest of the visitor, to create the desire to go to the publication's landing page on the publisher website.
  • The publication landing page will display the title and abstract of the work, but it could also show key illustrations and other elements of the work that encourage and stimulate the visitor to act – to hit the download button. Authors have little ability to act here because this page is usually under the control of the publisher or repository owner.
  • The final, ‘action’, step is to download and read the work, which could lead to further acts such as saving a publication's details on reference and citation management tools such as Mendeley and, looping back to ‘earned media’, citation and sharing among colleagues.

MY STORY

Round one: ‘We've failed’

My first article drew on data to show that the proportion of born‐open journal articles had stalled at around 20%, leading me to conclude that the dominant open access models, Gold and Green, had failed, and therefore, a new approach was needed (Green, 2017a). It was published in time for 2017s early autumn event season that comprised ALPSP Conference, COASP, STM Annual Conference, and Open Access Week. The timing was important because I wanted to use these events not only to promote the article but to engage with its intended audience: publishers and librarians.
On publication, I posted announcements on my Facebook page (where, at the time, I had about 150 friends), Twitter (~600 followers), and LinkedIn (~400 connections). The result, 72 click‐throughs. I also posted an announcement to two Listservs, generating 1,422 click‐throughs. Over the next 15 days, a period that included both the ALPSP and the COASP Conferences, I made 12 more ‘owned media’ promotional efforts: 10 using Twitter and 1 each on Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of the earned media was on Twitter, where more than 500 different people tweeted about the paper (see Fig. 2). This was an impressive volume, and many were researchers who exist outside my bubble (publishers, their suppliers, and librarians).
image
Number of tweets per day 7–22nd September 2017. Weekends shaded in grey.
Source: Altmetric.
The launch day (L+0) spike tailed off on L+1, a Friday, but picked up over the weekend and was sustained on L+5 and L+6 but then tailed off as soon as the ALPSP Conference started. Was my audience otherwise engaged and too busy to tweet? Or had the discussion exhausted itself already? All I can report is that a majority of ALPSP attendees that I spoke with had not heard of the paper, illustrating how hard it is to gain the attention of one's target audience even with the help of social media.
To my surprise, it all kicked off again on L+9 (Saturday 16th) with more than 100 tweets because an influencer, ‘mathgenius’, posted the article title and a link on Hacker News (HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15265507), which in turn was featured on HN's front page, triggering an automatic tweet to HN's 906 followers. This was re‐tweeted 30 times, including by various other HN bots, one of which had >20,000 followers. Midway through L+9, a tweet first posted on L+2 by Jon Tennent got a second wind and, together with the HN audience, drove the ‘conversation’ through the weekend. A fair proportion of the tweets contained comments or snippets from the article showing that the paper was being read, and it was not just a bunch of bots chatting to each other.
The spike on L+13, midway through the COASP meeting, was the result of my re‐tweeting an image that I found circulating that day on Twitter (Fig. 3). I linked the image to my article and, in an attempt to reach the COASP audience (I did not attend the meeting), added the meeting's hashtag. This tweet had 17,892 impressions, 42 re‐tweets, and 84 likes, and the trackable link to the Kudos publication page was clicked 166 times.
image
Image I found on Twitter and re‐tweeted with a link to my article and hashtagged to COASP Conference.
In addition to all the action on Twitter, Altmetric logged one blog post (Retraction Watch's Weekend Reads), seven mentions on Facebook, 19 Google+ posts, and three Reddit posts – none of which, apart from one on Facebook, were initiated by me. Incidentally, I am only able to piece together this story of what happened thanks to the earned media history captured and stored by Altmetric.
Over the next 8 months, I continued to promote the article, mainly using Twitter, each time using a trackable link from Kudos – each effort is shown with an ‘A’ in Fig. 4. After the launch month's high click‐through rate (CTR) (Table 1), the CTR fluctuated, with the next highest being in January, 5 months after publication. I also uploaded the Kudos‐created summary page in PDF form onto ResearchGate, where it has been viewed 753 times.
image
Altmetric score since publication of ‘We've Failed’ article (Green 2017a).
Source: Kudos and Altmetric.
Table 1. Efforts and click‐throughs
Month Efforts Click‐throughs Click‐throughs per effort
September 2017 22 2,278 104
October 2017 9 222 25
November 2017 2 64 32
December 2017 2 4 2
January 2018 1 275 275
February 2018 4 220 55
March 2018 1 7 7
April 2018 3 33 11
May 2018 1 0 0
  • Source: Kudos.
It is all very well being able to see who has been tweeting about my article and to get anecdotal feedback at conferences and from the occasional personal email, but what I really wanted was to know how often my article was being downloaded and by whom (or at least know at which institutions my readers work or study). Knowing where and by whom my article was being read would give me insight into where I might be having an impact and, crucially, where I was not being heard. As I had learned at the OECD, knowing this would help me learn more about my actual readership and help me target future promotion efforts to greater effect.
At OECD, we share download data with authors, and it usually confirms prejudices and produces surprises in equal measure. For example, I will not be breaking any confidences by revealing that European Union and United Nations institutions have a healthy appetite for OECD publications and datasets. But who would have thought that one country's army officer training school cannot get enough of OECD's works on education policy and the comparative performances of 15‐year‐olds at school? This latter data point prompted our education department to find out why resulting in an unknown unknown becoming a new connection. So, download data are invaluable yet, as I was to discover, hard to get.
Even though Kudos is set up to integrate download data, few publishers are able to export per‐article, per‐day usage data, and unfortunately Wiley, Learned Publishing's publisher, was not one of them. I had to request the data from the editor who obtained it from the publisher to discover that, by the end of September 2017, the article had been downloaded an astonishing 69,148 times. (This counter‐compliant data point was double‐checked to ensure it had not been distorted by bots.) In October, it was downloaded 1,834 times, in November 967 times, and at an average of 315 times a month from then on to the end of 2018. All I could get was the totals; I was unable to get any data on which institutions or even which countries were reading my article, and I had to wait until the middle of the next month to get last month's data – hardly real time and no help when it came to planning future promotion efforts.

Round two: ‘We're still failing’

A year later, I began to wonder if there had been any progress to overcome the failure to deliver open access. A cursory glance showed that nothing had changed: the needle showing the proportion of born‐open articles had not moved, so I reached again for my keyboard. This time, thinking on why the needle was stuck led me to conclude that scholarly publishing was unaffordable whether done on an open access or subscription basis. I suggested that lessons from digital transformation be drawn upon to reduce costs and proposed a two‐step process whereby scholars would first publish a preprint, and then, providing the preprint gained attention, the author would be invited to submit a paper for formal publication.
In order to be faithful to this proposition, I posted the paper as a preprint on the Zenodo platform on 6th September 2018, once again aiming for the autumn event season (Green, 2018).
In order to help readers funnel back to the original paper (and in addition to the usual citation link in the references), I added a tagged link in the preprint's abstract that would take readers to the Kudos‐hosted summary page of the 2017 paper. By the end of April 2019, this link had been clicked 429 times, which is 8% of all visitors to the preprint landing page.
Unfortunately, Zenodo's DOIs could not be integrated with the Kudos platform, so I could not use it to promote the preprint. However, Zenodo did integrate with Altmetric, so I can report on the preprint's owned and earned Twitter coverage (Fig. 5).
image
Tweets per day for the preprint recorded by Altmetric.
Source: Altmetric (Note that the x‐axis scale is very different to Fig. 2.).
This time, I had to work harder to gain attention: 36 of the 136 tweets (26%) over the launch period were mine (compared to 14 of 565 – 2.5% – the year before). My persistence was rewarded: for example, my three tweets during the COASP meeting triggered 20 re‐tweets. However, at an average of 9 tweets per day, attention was markedly down compared with the 35 tweets per day for the paper published a year earlier: the influencer ‘mathgenius’ did not come to my aid this time.
I did not keep a monthly record of the downloads (displayed in real time on the Zenodo platform), but at the end of April 2019, the preprint had had 5,426 views and 1,796 downloads, and recently, the count has been growing at about 300 and 150 per month, respectively. However, as before, the download data have no detail: my readers, their institutions, and their whereabouts remain unknown to me.
However, one of my objectives during this launch period was to ask for comment and feedback on the preprint, so I could improve the final paper. Within a month, I received substantive input from a dozen individuals, including two who corrected errors: this I considered to be a success.

Round three: Is open access affordable?

When I was writing the preprint, I was in contact with the editor of Learned Publishing, Pippa Smart, where the first paper was published. As she was not put off by the reaction to the preprint, I submitted a revised version to the journal in October 2018. It went through the usual peer review and acceptance process and was published on 25th January 2019 as part of a special issue ‘Bring the Facts, Bust the Myths’ (Green, 2019a).
As with the preprint, I had to work hard to win attention on Twitter, creating 29 out of the 146 tweets that mentioned the paper (Fig. 6), but with the launch period falling between two of the winter conferences (APE 2019 was in mid‐January and R2R was in late‐February), I was unable to generate much momentum after L+9 (2nd February).
image
Number of tweets per day for 25th January to 9th February 2019. Weekends shaded in grey.
Source: Altmetric.
Between January and May 2019, I promoted the paper on two Listservs, generating 497 click‐throughs, LinkedIn (48) and ResearchGate (14); tweeted 35 times (846); wrote two blog posts (88); and commented on two other blog posts (48).
Downloads of my article for January to April totalled 4,015 (Fig. 7, Article A). It is interesting to note that the ‘half‐life’ of my paper seems a little longer than the other two most‐popular papers, but Article D is unusual in building audience month by month.
image
Downloads (January to April 2019) per article for the first issue of Learned Publishing in 2019. My article is A. Note: The entire issue is free to download by anyone throughout 2019.
Source: Wiley/Learned Publishing.

Riding waves

One of the techniques I used to promote my articles is called ‘Riding the wave’. Essentially, one keeps an eye open for events, industry discussions, public statements, and social media conversations with which one can engage and draw attention to a paper.
For example, in early 2017, Elsevier published a suggestion about how to work toward open access (Hersh, 2017), which triggered a fair degree of comment on Listservs and the Twittersphere. I posted a reply in the form of a blog post on Medium in which I included a tagged link to my paper (Green, 2017b). I then drew attention to the blog post using Twitter and LinkedIn, attracting 1,400 reads from which there were 310 click‐throughs to the Kudos‐hosted summary page – a click‐through response rate of 22%.
Another example was the invitation for formal responses to Plan S. I posted my response as a blog post (Green, 2019b) and included tagged links to both papers' Kudos‐hosted summary pages. I drew attention to the post through Twitter and LinkedIn, and this effort resulted in 54 readers clicking through to the first paper's summary page and 72 to the latter.
Most of my wave riding has been on Twitter where I use one of two techniques: attract the attention of conference delegates by using conference hashtags or join conversations by replying to suitable tweets, in both cases using tagged links so I can track the result.
Five wave‐riding efforts that involved more than just ad hoc use of Twitter are summarized in Table 2. Each effort contained messages from the paper, so even if readers did not click through, a message was transmitted. It is interesting to note that it is still possible to generate a worthwhile click‐through and response rate many months post‐publication.
Table 2. Summary of efforts (excluding individual tweets)

Timing Context Effort Channel Result CT RR
Paper 1 L+20 Elsevier proposition ‘working toward OA’ Reply to Elsevier Medium 1,400 reads 310 22%

L+47 Invitation Pushmi‐Pullyu LSE Impact Blog ‘Most‐read listing’ 67 n/a

L+143 J of Infomatics Board ‘mutinies’ Are mutinies effective? Medium 610 reads 13 2%

L+153 Plan S Response deadline My response to Plan S Medium 611 reads 54 9%
Preprint L+46 Invitation Fail Fast LSE Impact Blog ‘Most‐read listing’ ? n/a
Paper 2 L+2 J of Infomatics Board ‘mutinies’ Are mutinies effective? Medium 610 reads 55 9%

L+15 Plan S Response deadline My response to Plan S Medium 611 reads 72 12%

L+96 BBC Radio 4 Programme on OA Replies to 6 Tweets Twitter 334 impressions 28 8%
  • Source: Kudos, Medium, and LSE Impact Blog.
  • Timing is days post‐launch. CT, click‐throughs to Kudos publication page; RR, response rate (CT/result).

DISCUSSION

Data everywhere but not a drop to drink

We know that our digital environment generates a firehose of data. Yet, for authors in scholarly communications, data are hard to come by. Unlike e‐commerce, where marketers create effective funnels with vertically integrated digital platforms, a scholarly author has to try and construct a Conversion Funnel from poorly‐ or unconnected platforms and tools, many of which will not or cannot share their data (see Fig. 8).
image
Conversion funnel showing data sources and availability.
Source: Author's illustration.
For my two formally published articles, I was able to access data from my owned social media accounts and, thanks to Altmetric, some earned media channels (e.g. Tweets written by other people). Kudos could give me data about click‐through rates on my tagged messages, traffic volumes to the summary page they host, and click‐throughs to the publisher page.
For example, for the first paper, as I write this, Kudos has logged 3,694 clicks from the 64 tagged promotion efforts I have made via owned media channels, 6,299 views of the summary page hosted by Kudos, and 878 clicks on the button that leads from that page to the article's landing page on the publisher website. That latter step from summary page to article landing page is a 14% click‐through rate – or to put it another way, only 14% of summary page viewers were sufficiently interested to have the desire to click through to the article.
However, this is where the data chain breaks: I have no way of knowing how many of those who arrived on the article landing page were actioned to download the paper. All I know is that more than 70,000 downloads have been recorded, but I am none the wiser about the share that came from search and my own efforts or from earned media, nor do I know anything about them, not even where they are located.
That the number of visitors to the Kudos‐hosted summary page (6,299) exceeds the number of clicks on tagged links (3,694) shows that the summary page is getting traffic from search and earned media – but I do not know how much from either nor have access to any logfile data that could help me understand more.
When it comes to citations, I get conflicting data. As I write, Kudos tells me the first paper has nine ‘CrossRef citations’ yet confusingly invites me to view them on Google Scholar, where I find a list of 10 citing works above which is the metadata for my article and the message ‘cited by 14’. Meanwhile, Altmetric shows eight citations (sourcing the data from its sister company, Dimensions). The article homepage on the publisher site shows seven citations. Confused? You will be.
De‐duping these records to arrive at a clean, comprehensive list of where my paper has been cited would not be easy – none of the sites offers a data feed or downloadable file. Nor do any of these tools offer alerts when new citations are found: for this, I have to rely on services like ResearchGate (which, incidentally, reports 14 citations).
A simple data feed from Kudos and Altmetric would have made it easier to create the charts in this paper – I had to type the data into a spreadsheet. Altmetric's premium customers can download the data for their publications, but you have to learn where the link is – something I only discovered when doing a final edit for this article! The data from Wiley arrived as a table in a word‐processing document and I had to spend time copy–pasting into a spreadsheet before I could chart it.

LICENCES AND REUSE: A CAUTIONARY TALE

As a favour, OECD once published a book for a resource‐strapped fellow IGO. They insisted the work be published using a CC‐BY licence. Six months post‐publication, the authors and IGO asked OECD to issue a commercial distributor with a take‐down notice not because the distributor was offering a version for sale but because it was a crudely produced e‐book that, in their opinion, could damage their reputation. The distributor had found the e‐book online and had probably used some sort of automated process to strip the (copyrighted) artist images from the cover and inside pages and re‐cast the work in a new format: the result was anything but professional (a dog's breakfast came to mind). To the frustration of the authors and IGO, I had to explain that there was nothing to be done; the distributor had not contravened any of the rules of a CC‐BY licence.
I tell this story because CC licences cut two ways when it comes to boosting dissemination and impact. Yes, others may well expose your work to audiences beyond your reach, but there are two issues to consider.
First, there is the issue of reputation risk described above. This can be mitigated by adding ND (non‐derivative) to a CC licence, requiring disseminators to stick with your version of the work.
Second, and this is harder to overcome, unless you work closely with your disseminators, you will have no idea who is re‐posting your work, if your work has reached a larger audience, or – indeed – if you are losing traffic and citations to alternative versions. In a world where funders are demanding impact reports from their fundees, getting access to all the download and citation data and knowing where your work has made a mark is going to be more and more important. At OECD, we encourage disseminators to use our shareable and embeddable editions because they are trackable: we can see when they have been embedded in websites and blogs and can monitor how often they are viewed there, and we can offer users a route to the fully downloadable and actionable editions on our website.
Working with partners to reach a broader audience is important, but keep an eye on your reputation and get the usage data.

LESSONS LEARNED


  1. Be strategic. Find and use a toolkit that will create a Conversion Funnel to build awareness and draw users through the interest, desire, and action steps. If possible, aim to publish just ahead of a series of events at which the paper can be promoted. (Note: I know that this will be a major challenge for most journals because they have such long and unpredictable production times and lack tools to plan releases. This is a major issue in journal publishing and one that publishers should be working to fix!) Choose your redistributors with care.
  2. Be data‐driven. Log, measure, and track your audience's progress through the Conversion Funnel. Measure your owned media promotion efforts, so you can find out what works and what does not.
  3. Be reactive. Use tools that report results of owned and earned media in real‐ or near‐real time. This will enable you to shape future promotion efforts around what is working and to engage with online conversations when they are happening. This is particularly important on Twitter and other social media sites where discussions and threads have short half‐lives.
  4. Listservs rock. They might predate the internet, but postings to Listservs had a higher response rate than any other channel.
  5. Reaching your target audience is hard: be active, be persistent. Even if your target audience is well‐defined and easy to target, winning their attention is hard because everyone is inundated with new information every day. So, do not be afraid to keep on going on. To avoid boredom and stimulate reaction, vary your message and tone. Use illustrations. Be opportunistic: if you suddenly discover there is an event going on, use the conference hashtag to follow it and jump in if you get the chance; if there is a new industry debate catching your target audience's attention, write a blog post (complete with tagged links to the article) and draw attention to that. Be active: do not be like one of the 80% on ResearchGate who just lurk (Khvatova & Dushina, 2019).
  6. Find influencers. As I found with the first paper, someone influential can take your message to a wholly new audience that is way beyond your own bubble. You might only have a couple of hundred followers on Twitter, but you might know someone who has a thousand or more. If you cannot approach them directly, wait until they post something relevant and reply intelligently. If they have a blog, watch what they write and then comment, with tagged links, when you can. If your work might interest a broader public, do not hesitate to contact journalists; earned mainstream media can reach way beyond your own bubble and reach important audiences like policymakers and concerned citizens.
  7. Be creative. Do not post ‘read my article’ messages. Post snippets that inform, pique curiosity, or contribute to debate. If possible, use illustrations that inform or entertain. Have a clear call to action, such as inviting comment and feedback or that leads to the next step in the Conversion Funnel.
  8. Keep going. Unless your work is really out of date, keep promoting it because there are always new audiences or new contexts that make your work relevant, even months post‐publication.
  9. Hassle your publisher for download data. Until publishers make download data publicly accessible in real time, regularly ask for it with as much detail as possible (where, when, who, etc.).
  10. It is less work than it seems. During the 2‐week launch period, I found I was scanning Twitter and other social media channels perhaps four or five times a day (for a total of perhaps 30 min a day) and spending perhaps another 30 min creating new tweets and replying/engaging with conversations on earned media. Afterwards, I dialled back the effort to my normal scanning level with the occasional burst of effort to write a blog post when needed. I am sure it never amounted to the other 50% of my day – I'm sure I spent longer researching and writing the original papers – but the results in terms of readership and impact are, I am sure, better than if I had simply published and passively left it to search engines to find my audience.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Each of the three articles cited in this case study are free to download. I must thank ALPSP and Wiley, respectively owner and publisher of Learned Publishing, and Zenodo, funded by CERN, for publishing my articles on a free‐to‐read and download basis. I also thank Kudos' Charlie Rapple for prompting me to write this paper.

Biography

  • biography imageT. Green

REFERENCES