ANALYSIS AND NEWS
other important items on their to-do lists, leaving their content to fend for itself in the wild.
Collaborating beyond silos Meanwhile, publisher and institutional communications teams would welcome opportunities to align their marketing and PR skills more closely with researchers’ subject expertise and passion. Researchers would also benefit from the application of marketing skills earlier in the publication process – for example, publishers and their staff are typically more familiar with the concepts of search engine optimisation, and can help to educate researchers on how the language they use can affect readership and searchability.
Many behaviours in this respect are still driven by the print era, when people browsed a table of contents and stopped short at a clever or witty title. So, many papers published in the digital era still employ the classic, two-clause approach as parodied by Witold Kie´n´c: something characterful – ‘Victory on an Invisible Enemy’ – followed by the meaningful phrase – ‘Success in Fighting X Disease with Y Therapy.’
A publisher marketing team, in partnership
with editorial colleagues, can support a researcher by explaining that search engines are responsible for the majority of traffic to publisher websites, and that your work will therefore achieve higher readership if you give it a short title, ‘frontloaded’ with the key terms early in the phrase, as these are ‘preferred’ by our robotic readers.
‘The challenge is to take a more strategic approach to metrics’
Human readers remain important: the keywords that they are likely to use in searching are also a vital consideration when titling work (even specialists will often tend towards plain language terms, for example) – so, again, matching publishers’ experience and skills with researchers’ subject expertise is necessary to maximise the likelihood of a work being discovered and read.
Measuring success
The transition to a primarily online research ecosystem has increased the ability to measure publication performance, with new indicators like views, downloads, and discussion now
commonly complementing traditional metrics such as citations. Yet, it remains challenging for researchers to look at these numbers in the round and make sense of what they mean in terms of impact.
Researchers who have invested – emotionally, financially, or both – in open access are increasingly eager not only to view metrics around their work, but also to connect metrics back to their own actions to better understand how they should invest their limited time for outreach. As the landscape continues to evolve, the challenge for publishers and institutions is to take a more strategic approach to metrics – using them not only to evaluate overall performance, but also to assess and refine the activities undertaken to achieve those results.
Open access publishers, having reinvented the author services market, have perhaps felt more keenly the need to move quickly towards such goals – but publishers of all business models must follow quickly to maintain their competitive edge.
Charlie Rapple is a co-founder of Kudos (
www.growkudos.com). This article is based on a webinar interview; the webinar can be watched at
www.beyondthebookcast.com/open-access- success-stories/
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