Kudos launch a new showcase to publicise COVID-related research

Could you give us a brief introduction to the history and primary objectives of Kudos?

I launched Kudos with two colleagues, almost ten years ago. We all had a background in scholarly publishing and communications, and were frustrated that so much online research content was going unread. We knew that publisher and university marketing departments had limited capacity to publicise individual research articles, and – in an era of crowdsourcing and social media – we thought there was a gap in the market for tools and services to help researchers communicate their own research more actively and effectively.

We focused initially on helping increase readership of published articles, but more recently we’ve expanded so researchers and universities can use Kudos at any stage in the research lifecycle, from pre-award to post-publication, to help build awareness and engagement. Most recently, we’ve launched new audience-growth services – time and again we heard from our customers that the thing they struggle with most is ensuring that their research is found and used by all their different stakeholder audiences – from other researchers, to policymakers, industry, educators, healthcare practitioners, the media, the general public and so on. We’ve been doing a lot of targeted work recently to put people’s research in front of those audiences, and provide data about the audiences reached.

What kind of research does Kudos publish, and who do you work with?

We are a one-stop shop for plain-language summaries of a wide range of research – from high-energy physics to performance art, academics are using Kudos to ensure more people find, understand, and use their research. We work closely with publishers, manuscript submissions services, and providers of ‘scholarly communication plumbing’ such as Crossref and ORCID, to minimise the effort involved for researchers – for example, pulling in publication lists that they have already created elsewhere, or enabling them to add a summary of their research during the submission process rather than having to do it separately.

You have recently launched a new COVID research platform. How does the platform work, and why is it important to collate and disseminate pandemic-related research in this way?

We have launched a number of these themed platforms, to try and provide the public, media, healthcare providers and so on with a single place where they can find trustworthy summaries of the evidence around the grand challenges of the day. We have worked with publishers, many of whom have sponsored the creation of professionally written summaries of relevant articles they have published. These have been written by our partner Impact Science, which is part of CACTUS.

“We are a one-stop shop for plain-language summaries of a wide range of research.”

People outside academia are less likely to know where to look for research articles, and less likely to be able to access or understand them – but for major public interest or health topics like COVID-19 or climate change, it’s super important that people can form opinions and make decisions based on quality evidence. The first step is to explain that evidence in plain language and the second is to bring it all together in a central place, rather than expect people to find their way through different university or publisher silos. We also run comprehensive digital marketing campaigns around the platforms and the content to help get the information into the places where non-academic audiences are likely to be looking, such as social media, search engines and so on.

Who is the target audience of the new platform?

For the COVID platform, we particularly want to help patients and the media understand more about the progress being made in diagnosing and treating coronavirus. With our climate change platform, we were trying to help the general public understand what changes researchers recommend we can each make in our own lives. We were also trying to provide some optimism by showcasing promising developments that could soon revolutionise our use of green energy, for example, new chemicals that will radically improve the productivity of solar cells.

We are currently working towards the launch of another platform around artificial intelligence – with this one, we want to help answer the questions people increasingly have about how AI actually works, how it is being applied, whether it can be trusted!

“We are building up valuable insights into the best ways to communicate different kinds of research to different kinds of audience.”

Do you have any advice for readers who are worried about the spread of scientific disinformation in the wake of the pandemic?

I guess most of your readers are working in the academic sector so they probably are already better able than many to verify whether information has a trustworthy source. I would say always check whether any sources have been given for the facts being presented – does it say ‘based on such-and-such a study by so-and-so at university X’. If no mention is made of who came up with a recommendation or how, or if a vague provenance is given but without a link, say, that would potentially flag that it isn’t entirely to be trusted. If the information you are looking at mentions organisations involved in its creation, consider their agenda and whether you can trust them to be impartial. Involvement of academic organisations such as the Royal Society of Chemistry, Institute of Physics, or university presses would always indicate to me a certain credibility.

Do you feel that the nature of scientific outreach has changed in some way because of COVID-19?

Yes, I think it has been a catalyst in a couple of ways. Firstly, because everyone was locked down, we all became much more accepting of online communication and the services provided became rapidly more sophisticated.

At Kudos we opened up free access to our premium features for a time to help people get their research in front of the audiences they would usually have presented to at events and workshops and so on. We had massive uptake and lots of really powerful stories about emerging research. Another way in which the pandemic affected science communication was in the sudden increase in the public appetite for research – and a rehabilitation of ‘experts’ in the eyes of the public! Suddenly everyone was an armchair scientist with a huge, personal interest in scientific data, progress, findings, recommendations and so on. People became much more conversant with scientific processes and language. People have talked a lot about the ‘threshold’ of science that non-scientists are afraid to cross. That threshold moved back a bit and we’ve seen an uptick in readership of our summaries from a broader range of audiences, as people have lost their ‘fear’ of research and begun seeking out trustworthy information on a broad range of topics.

What are your future plans when it comes to Kudos?

We will continue our audience-growth initiatives, providing more cross-publisher, cross-university collections of plain-language summaries of trustworthy research – on topics such as mental health, and equality, inclusivity and diversity. As well as helping more people find, understand, and act on research, we’re also doing this to help build the influence and recognition of research and researchers. Along the way we are building up valuable insights into the best ways to communicate different kinds of research to different kinds of audience – and capturing unique data about how audiences respond. We are already thinking about how we can make best use of those data and insights in the long term – how we can help people understand and report on the influence of their research, within and beyond academia.

Contact

W: info.growkudos.com/research-stories

W: www.growkudos.com/showcase/collections/coronavirus

Kudos launch a new showcase to publicise COVID-related research