This week, I shall mostly be at the 2:AM Conference in Amsterdam, organized by our friends at Altmetric. In celebration of that, I have created another "out of the box" video (following this summer's smash-hit explanation of ORCID using a box of toys).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6xQ2H_HVms]
Beyond the simple explanation in the video, I'm often asked how Kudos differs to Altmetric's services.
- Kudos is not a metric. We are a toolkit for explaining work in plain language, and sharing it across multiple networks and media. We bring together metrics (from providers including Altmetric.com, Thomson Reuters, and our individual publisher partners) to help researchers, institutions and publishers understand which kinds of communication activity most drive readership and impact of research.
- Kudos provides a range of metrics at a high level - Altmetric provides depth. Users of our free services for researchers, or subscribers to Kudos for Institutions or Kudos for Publishers, can review high-level summaries of a publication’s altmetric performance in the context of other publication performance measures. To see the sources behind the Altmetric score, or undertake more sophisticated analysis, you need to subscribe to Altmetric's services (for institutions or publishers).
- Kudos shows how conversations are started - Altmetric shows how they progress. By centralizing researchers' management of their communications, Kudos provides institutions and publishers with immediate notifications of which researchers are talking about their work, when and where - including over closed channels like email. This enables institutions and publishers to better support these efforts - from resharing "open" communications with broader channels (e.g. retweeting) to understanding which precise actions are generating which precise results, enabling more tailored guidance (e.g. "other people like you seem to be having most success with LinkedIn"). Altmetric shows how those communications take off in social media, as well as reporting when work is picked up in other materials such as government policy or Wikipedia.
- Kudos motivates outreach - Altmetric measures it. I might be reprising point 1 here. By bringing together a range of publication measures and mapping them to communications activities, Kudos shows researchers how simple and quick efforts can increase the readership of their work - thereby providing the evidence needed to encourage more of these activities. Altmetric's data is one of the valuable measures by which we can help researchers (and institutions, and publishers) understand the effects of these efforts.
For more information about Kudos' services for institutions and publishers, and if you'd like to chat at 2:AM this week, don't hesitate to contact me (or via Twitter). For more information about Altmetric's services for institutions and publishers, see their website or contact info@altmetric.com.
P.S. Other altmetric providers are available!
P.P.S. If you're not at 2:AM but would like to catch up with Kudos, Melinda, David and Ann will all be at next week's Frankfurt Book Fair - just drop us a line if you'd like to find time for a chat.