27 March 2019
Kudos, the award-winning service for accelerating research impact through strategic communications management, has today announced a partnership with DataCite. Through this new partnership, Kudos will provide researchers with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for their research projects and programs, to support more widespread dissemination, engagement and tracking of impact activities. DOIs will be assigned to ‘project profiles’ created on Kudos as part of its new service for managing engagement and showcasing work to a wider range of target audiences.
“DOIs have become an essential part of the research ecosystem, but to date these have primarily been applied to individual outputs such as articles or data sets,” comments James Bloomer, Chief Technology Officer at Kudos. “By enabling researchers to get DOIs for their projects and programs, we make it much easier for work at that level to be referenced, and for discussion around it to be tracked. Through our existing partnership with Altmetric, we can now provide attention data at the project level, and enable researchers to quickly and easily review this alongside other metrics about the effectiveness of their communications.”
“Funders and universities are increasingly looking to researchers to achieve and evidence reach and engagement with their work, particularly outside of academia,” continues David Sommer, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Kudos. “Individual publications still have an important role to play, but the broader context of research activity and outputs is important too. We will now provide researchers with a structured format and identifier for summarizing, showcasing and tracking interest in their work, from the very inception of a project or initiative, and ongoing throughout its lifecycle – providing a consistent and persistent mechanism for building and tracking impact potential from day one.”
The partnership – believed to be the first time that project DOIs are being offered at scale – responds to a challenge identified by researchers, that the digital presence of their research projects and programs is often either ephemeral (associated with partners or services that may not persist throughout or after the project) or fragmented (with a range of research objects and outputs hosted in different places, and no central project hub). This challenge makes it difficult for stakeholders or interested parties to reliably reference or link to projects, in turn making it difficult for researchers to track engagement at the project level or during the project’s lifecycle. By providing persistent DOIs at project level, Kudos is bringing together one of the scholarly sector’s most useful bits of infrastructure (DOIs), with its most common communication format (project websites) – enabling researchers and their projects to finally benefit from a wide range of DOI-based workflows and services.
For further information about the new research group features from Kudos, please contact Charlie Rapple, charlie@growkudos.com, +44 1865 872527.
About Kudos
275,000 researchers use Kudos for managing communications around their publications – across multiple publishers and tools. Kudos has over 100 publisher, institutional, society and corporate customers around the world. Kudos is shortly launching a new communications and engagement toolkit for research groups that enables them to collaborate and communicate about their work from the earliest stage of a project. Through this new service, research groups and departments can showcase their projects, create and action a communication plan, and track reach and engagement with broad audiences, within and outside of academia – all in one place. For more information: https://www.growkudos.com/about/research_groups
About DataCite
DataCite is a leading global non-profit organisation that provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for a range of research outputs. Our goal is to help the research community locate, identify, and cite research with confidence. https://datacite.org/