Here are a number of tips which I feel can help researchers make use of social media and related online activities to maximise the visibility of their research papers.

These are based on my personal experiences and I’ve learnt a lot through trying to make my own papers more visible:

1. Be pro-active:

For example, for the delivery of a recent paper, the co-authors agreed a plan on how to inform the members of our professional networks.  We uploaded the paper to the institutional repository and included the URL on our presentation slides, which were then uploaded to Slideshare (an online resource for sharing slides) shortly before the presentation.  This meant that could write blog posts with appropriate short URLs available in advance, which we could use whilst we responded to questions on social media channels such as Twitter during the presentation.  The key is to find the opportunities you have to promote your work and then make sure you maximise these by being prepared.

2. Monitor what works:

Monitor where people are getting your report from to find out the best channels for promoting it. A good way to do this is through usage statistics.  Look at Slideshare and YouTube views and Google Analytics (which can tell you how many visits you have had to a page and track where they are coming from).  Websites like Topsy provide statistics on URL usage and Twitter hashtags (these mark your work on a subject area and mean you can monitor twitter responses and activity).  Topsy can also provide comparisons with previous work and approaches taken by your peers.

3. Make it easy for readers:

Make it easy for those who are interested in your research to access your research by providing links to the papers.  Remember that they’ll want to read the paper and not the metadata about the paper, so provide direct links to the paper or key parts of it.  You may find that readers view your papers in mobile devices – perhaps even in bed!  So consider making your paper available in a mobile-friendly format such as HTML (this is the ‘language’ that web pages are written in).

4. Don’t forget the links:

Between 50-80% of traffic to institutional repositories come from Google.  A good way to ensure you come up near the top of a search is to use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques, making sure key words in the content are placed effectively to increase web traffic.  For papers hosted in open access repositories you will probably not be able to address ‘on-the-page SEO’ – tailoring the content or headings.  Therefore it will be important to provide ‘off-the-page SEO’ – links to the repository item.

5. Encourage feedback and discussion:

Unlike repositories, social media stories are often decided by support feedback and discussion.  We can exploit this feature by being involved with these discussions, use it as an opportunity to answer questions or correct mistakes and ask for feedback.

6. Develop your network:

Seek to grow your network and create new contacts. For example, conferences that you attend may have their own Twitter hashtag (which people can search by to find out information on the event).  This provides you with an ideal opportunity to develop your Twitter network.  You could follow other researchers who have similar interests to yourself, or tweet about the conference.

7. Understand your social media network:

Understanding who is getting to your information and how is key to successful promotion, and is the same with social media.  Twitter analytics tools such as SocialBro can provide insights into your network, by showing you who your followers are.

8. Know your limits in the social media environment:

‘Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Academia.edu, YouTube… I haven’t got the time!’  Remember that you can’t expect to make use of every social web service which is available.  Prioritise channels based on relevance and the potential to reach your key audiences.  Analysing these channels will help you to prioritise.

9. Seek improvements:

Reflect on your use of social media and online services and identify improvements you can make.  If things aren’t working, change it!

10. And finally my top piece of advice… participate!

If you’re not there you can’t reap the benefits!

I hope these tips are helpful.  More information can be found in the slides I used for my presentation in Open Access week or on my blog.

Brian Kelly works for the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN, based at the University of Bath.

Data from OpenDOAR (an authoritative worldwide directory of academic open access repositories)

As Heather Morrison describes in her blog post, there is plenty to celebrate in the continuing growth of open access.

Here at JISC we have been supporting emerging open access practices for over a decade. We’re busy building services and communities to support universities to respond to the changing landscape of education and research on a global, networked scale.

This week we has been highlighting some of the recent work that supports developments in open access and helps to raise awareness of the tools available:

• Watch our JISC open trailer and find out what open can do for you for the future
• Explore CORE the JISC-funded place to visit for open access research papers from across the world
• Hear how Open Education Resources could help your part-time tutors in our podcast
• Take a look at JISCs animation to find out about open data licensing
• Senior managers: find out what we can do for you by exploring our open education resource info kits
• Caren Milloy, Head of Projects at JISC Collections is exploring open access to save monographs, the question is – how?
• Read a blog post on the UK’s contribution to the European progress of open access from Rachel Bruce, digital infrastructure innovation director at JISC.

Key themes in the global discussion around International Open Access Week this year for education and research seem to be:

• the potential of opening up communications for greater public engagement and impact
• the relationship with open educational resources and concepts of digital learning and research
• the various approaches emerging to academic publishing; such as green, gold, self-publishing and new forms of journals
• the issues around opening up research data
• the renewed focus on Creative Commons licensing options into open access research articles

There is so much happening that it can be difficult to keep track of! What do you think the challenges and opportunities are for #openfutures?

… You could be thinking about challenges – how do we ensure we can benefit from text mining?

… You could be thinking about new aspects of open – will designs for 3D printers become an important area for exploring the potential of open approaches; do universities need to focus more on open innovation?

… You could be thinking about how to scale up good practice in areas like open educational resources?

There has been great progress and there is a lot to celebrate but we recognise there is also a lot to do and we want to ensure that JISC can help the sector realise the benefits offered by an open future…

Comment on this post or tweet with the #openfutures by 3pm GMT today and we will report back this afternoon!

The aim of the workshop was to collaborate with our counterparts in Europe to achieve the vision and recommendations identified in the European Commission Communication on open access and the preservation of scientific information.  As summarised by my colleague Paul Stokes, what the Communication asks is that:

• Research and funding policies which reflect the new open and linked digital world.
• Policies that are defined at a national and sub-national level.
• A robust and interconnected e-infrastructure is required to improve preservation & access to scientific information.
• A suitable new solution which needs to be established to support the transition in publication methods and emerging scientific processes.

The key principles of the Communication are:

All publicly funded research should be made available through open access as early as possible.

• That this should be underpinned by robust preservation.
• Business will benefit from access to research.

It’s imperative for Europe to work together to realise these aims and this was something all delegates seemed dedicated to achieve.  Experts at the meeting tackled open access, open research data and preservation.  A range of issues were raised where further collaboration, and in some cases coordination, is required.  These were naturally from the policy, infrastructure provider and information professional perspective – after all we were discussing implementing the Communication recommendations at a national level and moving the underpinning infrastructure forward to support policy.

The Commission wants to help Europe make progress and recommend a coordinated follow-up to their recommendations through “national points of reference”.   It is early days, a survey of workshop participants asked if they had or intended to appoint a national point of reference.

• 29% indicated that a national point of reference had been appointed already
• Of the 71% who haven’t yet appointed a national point of reference, 54% expressed an intention to appoint one.

However, thinking about the change in the practice of research is also very important.  How can you marry the policy direction with research practice?  Of course many researchers are undertaking open research and are also involved in curation of their outputs.  However, in order to make a more wholesale change the need to address the issue of incentives was raised; how can researchers be incentivised to make their research open access, whether it is the data or the final paper, and how can they fulfil the curation needs required to fulfil the aspirations of the communication?

A critical area of importance that the research data group focused on was the issue of skills, and the fact that digital data management requires a set of skills that are not yet widely developed and practised.  There have been developments in this area (for one example see the  JISC research data programme) but it was believed by the experts that the skills of both information professionals and researchers needs more attention if the aim of open access data is to be realised.  Discussion focused on the need for recognised qualifications for information professionals, training for early career researchers; and librarians and scientists working together on data management.

One of the aims of the workshop was to start to identify areas where collaboration and co-ordination might help member states achieve the goals of the Communication.  Generally there were a lot areas raised where exchange of knowledge would be valuable, but rather than a new forum being required it was felt there are already mechanisms, although in some cases these might need further resource.

For example, in the area of open access for publications discussion indicated that working through existing fora on sharing what works in national transition models and financial arrangements for transition to Open Access should be possible.  However, a gap which no obvious existing body fulfilled was identified; this was the area of specific infrastructure for Open Access.  The discussion concluded there is a requirement for further work on identifying both the needs, and addressing sustainability and governance arrangements for Open Access infrastructure.

The workshop has started to raise the profile of the need to further address European collaboration and coordination, whether it is through mechanisms based on the national points of reference or ensuring existing forums seek to further address the recommendations.  I believe that Europe does need to work on these issues collaboratively to remain competitive and the Communication offers a framework for this.

Knowledge Exchange and the European e-Infranet project hosted the workshop with 60 participants from across a wide range of European member states.

You can’t wait to have the book in your hands and show your mum, flaunt it under the nose of the VC and place it on your bookshelf. Yes it’s going to look great in your new office and the citations will start flowing soon. Yep. This is the beginning of….

Oh no wait, what’s that? It only sold 30 copies, worldwide.

In the last ten years, library print book purchasing expenditure has declined from 11.9% of their overall budgets in 1999 to 8.4% in 2009 (RIN, 2010). The average number of sales of monographs to libraries has declined from around 2,000 in 1980 to around 200 in the early years of this century (Willinsky, 2009)

This creates two problems for researchers. First, it decreases the number of readers with access to individual monographs, meaning that the flow of knowledge that underpins research is compromised. Second, it means that many scholarly monographs become economically unviable, leading to concerns that publishers may select titles based primarily upon the potential for sales rather than scholarly worth.

So how do we…

a) Keep the monograph alive to allow humanities and social science researchers to present considered arguments

b) Help increase readership to foster new connections and research, and

c) Find an economic model to sustain the publishing and dissemination of monographs – in both electronic and print.

These are some of the questions we are trying to answer in our open access monograph project –  OAPEN-UK being managed by JISC Collections. What if your monograph was available online for free for everyone to read as a PDF or in HTML and in addition libraries and academics could still purchase print (60% of academics still prefer print) or e-book editions if they wanted them? There would be no limits on who can read your book – discoverable to all through online search engines and the sales of the print could support the sustainability of the Open Access version. And of course each book is put through the same peer review processes that normal print books are – you could even experiment with open peer review – or get input from fellow colleagues as you write.

This is the model we are exploring in OAPEN-UK with 58 monographs matched into pairs – half available in OA and half available through standard methods. We are gathering sales, usage and citation data to assess performance – do the OA titles get more usages and sales than the control group titles?

In addition we are gathering data on perceptions, attitudes and priorities and processes to help us work out how a move to OA publishing may work. We recently did a survey of HSS academics – and had around 700 responses. Here are some of the highlights:

• Only 50% of researchers are aware of OA and only 30% familiar with it.
• Around 50% of researchers think it is ok to make a profit from OA publishing as long as that profit goes back into supporting the discipline or making more OA content available – 20% think you can make a profit and use it however you like and 20% think that you can make a profit but only to cover costs.
• Almost 80% would prefer the most restrictive Creative Comms licence, but what is interesting is that the responses show that researchers are more concerned about protecting their work than it being used commercially.
• 60% had read a monograph in the last couple of days – 39% had bought it and 33% had got it via the library
• Early career academics are more willing to consider self-publishing than later career researchers.
• 397 that had published a mono, book chapter or co-authored a mono since 2000 where interviewed. The authors picked their publishers because 1st they are good at disseminating to the right audience, 2nd cause they have good QA process, 3rd cause they are the best in their filed and 4th because they were the only ones interested!
• Phd students were more likely to rely on the library that late career academics
• Print still dominates reading preferences but less so for early career academics
• Perception of the group was that open access will have negative impacts on quality, reputation and reward but will be brilliant for availability and efficiency – so clearly any open access model really has to address quality and think about impacts in terms of the REF and reputations. Oh and no one really cares about royalties!

You can view all the results of the survey at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/researchersurvey/

You can also read about focus groups with publishers, research funders, librarians, learned societies and ebook aggregators at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/y1-initial-focus-groups/

We are doing lots and lots of research so stay involved by following us on @oapenuk or visiting the OAPEN-UK website at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/, or by joining us at events: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/events/

This was the question that JISC set out to answer by funding 9 experimental projects to analyse and exploit activity data to provide new services to researchers and students or to improve existing services. These projects covered recommendation services for library and repository content, access grid usage patterns, analysing data for student retention, virtual learning environment usage data, the link between student attainment and library usage and the possibility of taking a user centered approach to activity data.

The simple answer is yes, there are lots of ways that working with activity data could be useful. But there are many technical, legal, skills and policy issues that need to be addressed in order to do so. To enable others to learn from the experience of these projects and to copy the technical and legal solutions they developed we have produced a site that summarises all that was learned in the programme. The site is live now. It provides a high level overview of what activity data is, why it is useful and how it can be exploited and also contains detailed recipes for anyone who wants to start the process of exploiting activity data at their institution. You can also read more about the projects that made up the programme.

The site was produced by Sero Consulting working with Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen.

One interesting question about activity data is should it be made openly available? There are plenty of challenging issues here to do with anonymisation, compliance with data protection and ensuring that the users are appropriately informed and it is what they want. But there are also benefits to open data. A good illustration of what can happen with open activity data is the Book Galaxy app below that uses the library circulation data released as part of the JISC Mosaic project to provide an innovative interface for exploring the relationship between books. The activity data guide includes resources that address the question of open data and links to open data released by some of the projects.

Here’s the Book Galaxy – move your mouse around the galaxy to see the titles. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java

It seems to me that there is likely to be appetite for further innovation with activity data as it offers the potential for more efficient institutional services and new functionality that can enrich the research and learning experience. Both of which are important drivers in the current climate. We will be funding further work on 4 of the 9 projects to explore whether they can develop further answers or produce useful services. There is also a programme of projects on Business Intelligence managed by my colleague Myles Danson, these projects are building solutions for storing and analysing data about the business critical operations within universities. You can read an overview of the projects on the JISC website and there is a useful JISC Infonet Infokit on the topic of business intelligence. Within JISC we are also starting to think about the bigger picture of business intelligence for universities and what we can do to help universities exploit emerging opportunities so look out for future work in this area.

Find out more about this work and that of the digital infrastructure team on their blog.

Why all this interest now? One reason might be the overwhelming evidence that open access is a desirable destination for all kinds of reasons.  A joint report was released last month from JISC, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium, RLUK and the Wellcome Trust, which showed clearly that moves toward open access were supported by an analysis of the costs, benefits and risks in scholarly communication.  A recent Danish study of SMEs showed that most of them struggle to access findings from publicly funded research, which surely inhibits innovation.  JISC, on behalf of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, is commissioning three further studies to discover how open access can support the work of the private, public and third sectors, and these studies will report over the next six months or so.

But there are other reasons why open access is gaining a lot of attention from governments.  We have known for some time that the knowledge economy depends on the application of codified, technical knowledge.  As David Cameron and Barack Obama pointed out this week  “science and higher education are the foundation stones of their two nations’ 21st century economies”.

Most readers will know that JISC has been an advocate of open access for some time but that does not mean we have taken an uncritical stance.  Now that the direction of travel is established and widely accepted, there are some tricky practical challenges to overcome.  For example:

• Open access is likely to look different, and emerge at different speeds in different disciplines.  In some disciplines such as the life sciences, there are major, innovative publishers such as the Public Library of Science, and repositories such as UK PubMedCentral supported by research funders.  In other disciplines, such as chemistry, open access is not yet growing fast.
• The transition to open access will need to be co-ordinated to ensure the continuity and rigour of the peer review system.  Again, the Public Library of Science is leading the way here, exploiting the opportunities of digital technologies while preserving academic rigour.  JISC’s new programme in campus-based publishing is exploring an alternative approach that has had success in other countries already.
• The institutional repository infrastructure, while mature and reasonably comprehensive, is not yet as joined-up as it needs to be.  JISC will be commissioning work in this area during 2011-12, and will be working with international initiatives such as the European OpenAIRE project.

Open access publishing faces a number of specific challenges, which could be summarised under the following six headings:

a)      Funding outputs from research that is not grant-supported.  This is a real challenge, and one that is likely to fall mainly to universities, who might want to act collectively to address it, as in the COPE scheme in the US.  Some publishers offer waivers, which is helpful.

b)      Funding outputs produced after the end of the grant.  This can be addressed by changing the ways in which grants are administered, for example by making it clearer and more straightforward for indirect costs to be used in this way.

c)      Complexity of funding arrangements from an author’s perspective.  Here, I think funders, universities and publishers do simply need a way to sit down together and develop a better set of arrangements.  There may be lessons from the approach taken by the Wellcome Trust, especially if research grant funding becomes more concentrated.

d)      Need for transparency in costing, especially for hybrid journals.  There seems to be no consensus that these are a way to transition to open access.

e)      Absolute cost.  Recent research shows that the average article processing charge needs to be under £2000 for the cost-benefits to work for the UK.  It seems likely that the PLoS-One publishing model, now widely emulated, must be a large part of the answer.  In the medium term, this needs to be combined with agreements on the wider sharing of usage statistics and citation data , and review services such as the Faculty of 1000, to open up a market in services to help readers navigate the literature.

f)       Distribution of costs / benefits among the sector.  Will research intensive universities have to pay more?  This is not necessarily the case, if arrangements are in place to ensure that research papers from grant-funded research are supported via those grants.  However, this will require close monitoring and perhaps collective action, and JISC Collections may well have a role in seeing a way through this.

We are working towards making open access in the UK both good for the research community and good for UK plc.

JISC Podcast:
How you can build a business case for open access policy