Interview
‘It just frustrates me to see research not being read and used’
Kudos co-founder Charlie Rapple explains her passion for accelerating the dissemination – and impact – of science
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications… I got into the scholarly communication sector by accident. I’d studied history of art and had a holiday job at a fine art publisher. When I graduated and looked for a publishing job, I saw an ad in the local paper for something called an ‘electronic publisher’. I had no idea what that meant, but it had the magic words ‘no experience necessary’, so I applied. That was at CatchWord, a pioneer of online publishing technology and services. My first role was converting the printers’ postscript files into digital articles complete with live reference links. I had just left university, where I had spent a lot of time in the library, photocopying reference lists, looking up shelf references, hunting down the text cited, and so on. So I really ‘got’ the value and importance of just being able to click on a link in a reference list. From that I became product manager for metadata, before moving into marketing – kind of by chance, as I was helping cover a colleague’s maternity leave. My boss, Doug Wright, sent me on a Chartered Institute of Marketing course that changed my career – I gained a postgraduate diploma and a new understanding of, and respect for, marketing as a strategic driver of a business. Later, I went to work for my
16 Research Information Summer 2022
Kudos co-founder Melinda Kenneway at TBI Communications, and spent many happy years consulting for publishers, universities and societies.
What does Kudos do – and have you been involved in any particularly interesting projects recently? Kudos helps more people find, understand and act on research. The world has so many knowledge gaps and you can see the problems that creates, on everything from Covid to climate to badger culling. People don’t want to be told what to do by ‘authorities’ – they need to be persuaded, which means they need to make sense of the evidence for themselves, and feel they have been given the chance to make their own minds up. I think every bit of research should come with a simple summary of what it’s about and why it’s important, what its findings or recommendations are. And we need to make those easy for people to find – not hidden in a funding proposal or a university report, but collated and promoted in a centralised way. The word ‘promotion’ is one I shied away from for many years – many people feel research shouldn’t need promotion, that it should stand on its own merits. But that’s conflating two different things. Even the best research isn’t going to make a
“The world has so many knowledge gaps and you can see the problems that creates”
difference in the world if no-one can find it. I firmly believe it’s not enough just to make information available – you have to proactively make your potential audiences aware of it. For the last 10 years, Kudos has been giving researchers the skills, tools and confidence to communicate more effectively. But in the last couple of years we’ve massively expanded our supporting activities on the promotional side. We now do a lot more to grow the audience for the summaries on our platform, and I’ve been leading our projects in this area. This has involved setting up ‘knowledge cooperatives’, where publishers work together to broaden the audience for research around a public interest topic, such as climate change, artificial intelligence, or diversity and equality. We have commissioned professionally
written summaries of published research on these topics, and run substantial multi-
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