Kudos, the new service that helps academics and their institutions maximize the impact and visibility of their publications, has announced that it attracted registrations and usage from over 1,000 academic authors around the world within 24 hours of going live in mid September. The alpha site has been accessible by invitation to a selection of researchers who have recently published with Kudos’ pilot partners AIP Publishing, the Royal Society of Chemistry and Taylor & Francis. Authors have engaged enthusiastically with the site’s core functionality, with over 2,500 articles “claimed” in order to be enhanced with additional metadata and multimedia, and then shared via social media and email.
“We’ve barely even begun our roll-out to authors so this high initial response rate is extremely encouraging,” explains Melinda Kenneway, Director of TBI Communications and co-founder of Kudos. “It bears out the research we undertook earlier in Kudos’ development, in response to which 84% of academics indicated that they thought more could be done to raise the visibility, impact and usage of their work, and 80% considered it their personal responsibility to do this.”
“Even with such promising survey results, we still couldn’t be sure until this point that what authors thought should be done would translate to what they would actually do,” continues David Sommer of David Sommer Consulting, and also co-founder of Kudos. “We’re now opening up Kudos to additional publishers to participate in Kudos’ beta phase, from January 2014; these early results clearly demonstrate that Kudos offers the right mix of benefits, at the right time, to be a success with academic authors eager to increase the impact of their work.”
Kudos builds on major trends in academic research and publishing, including research evaluation and article-level metrics; the increasing importance and measurement of social media as a discovery channel; information overload and the need for tools to support “intelligent reading”; and publishers’ growing focus on services for authors, as open access and other developments increase competition for quality submissions. While it draws on existing initiatives, standards and data that enable academics and their institutions to measure and monitor the impact of published work, Kudos uniquely provides tools and guidance to help maximize impact, usage, social discussion and citations. It complements existing publisher services, helping to optimize marketing and PR resource, and drives all traffic back to the full text hosted on the publishers’ sites.
“Our participation in the Kudos alpha phase has given us valuable early insight into academics’ expectations and behaviours,” comments Ian Bannerman, Managing Director of Taylor & Francis. “Clearly, authors are willing to invest time in highlighting their articles, and Kudos has the potential to help us pursue our shared interest in maximizing the impact and visibility of their work.”
Further results from Kudos’ alpha phase will be published following its completion at the end of 2013. The list of publishers participating in the beta phase will be finalized shortly, so we invite publishers that are interested in participating to contact us at info@growkudos.com.
An email list and blog for further updates are available at www.growkudos.com, or you can follow “GrowKudos” on Twitter or Facebook.