Our latest publisher case study was with Edwina Thorn, Journals Executive at Policy Press -  a Social Sciences and Social Policy publisher - who have been a Kudos partner since 2016.

What were your goals in partnering with Kudos?

Policy Press has always worked closely with authors to ensure their work makes a positive social impact. Our social mission makes us stand out from other publishers, and the assistance we provide in crossing the boundaries of research, policy and practice is one of the key reasons authors and editors choose to work with us. When we heard about Kudos, we thought it provided an interesting new way for us to help our authors maximise the impact of their work, and to develop the ways in which we implement our social mission.

How does it fit in with other activities?

Kudos helps us connect with authors so that we can work together to promote their research. The many reports provided via the Kudos publisher dashboard are useful for informing our marketing and social media activities. They allow us to easily identify highly engaged authors, or journal articles with top altmetric scores, to mention just a few examples. We’re particularly pleased that our list of most read articles published in 2016 featured a number of authors who are actively engaged in promoting their work via Kudos, and we’ve been drawing attention to this in recent marketing campaigns to our authors.

Kudos makes it really easy for authors to engage and quickly see the benefits of publicising their work.

Have you focused on on any particular publications or authors?

We have initially focused on two things: making Kudos as easy as possible for our authors to adopt, and explaining the many benefits of Kudos to authors. In order to make using Kudos really easy, we have set up the integration between Kudos and Editorial Manager to enable authors to submit a plain language summary at the point of article submission. We’ve already seen a good proportion of authors submitting their summaries via Editorial Manager, and these are then automatically transmitted to Kudos when an article is accepted for publication. We’ve also published a guide to getting started with Kudos on the Policy Press blog, which provides some top tips, as well as outlining some of the benefits of using Kudos. In addition to the perhaps more immediately obvious benefits of providing plain language summaries of academic research, we have focused on explaining the advantages of the Kudos author dashboard and in particular, the citation, download, altmetrics, and social sharing data this displays and tracks. At a time when funding bodies are increasingly asking researchers for evidence of their impact, this is a great time-saving tool for our authors.

How did you introduce authors to Kudos?

Each of our published journal authors is contacted by Kudos via email with information about how to use the service. Prior to this we also contact authors to let them know what to expect. Beyond this we regularly highlight Kudos in marketing campaigns, and in author information on our website. Guidance on how to use Kudos features in our ‘Author guide to maximising impact’, and also in a recent Kudos webinar recording for University Presses.

It’s about Kudos being present throughout the publishing journey and not just another thing to tell authors about at the end of the process.

How easy has it been to implement Kudos?

We’ve found it rather easy to implement Kudos. Our publishing platform provider, Ingenta Connect, was able to set up the data feed and Kudos widget, which means the necessary information is automatically delivered to Kudos and plain language summaries are shown alongside the published article on our publishing platform. Policy Press is also the first publisher to set up the integration with Editorial Manager, and despite being the ‘guinea pig’ we’ve so far found this quite straightforward.

What is the effect of all of this?

We're already beginning to see greater author engagement in the promotion of their work, and look forward to developing this further as more of our authors become familiar with Kudos. We're excited about all the new developments Kudos have in the pipeline, which will make it even quicker and easier for our authors to make a real difference with their research.