(2 Feb 2021) Kudos, the award-winning service for accelerating and broadening research impact, has today launched a new service for scholarly publishers and publishing societies. The Kudos Showcase for Publishers provides a beautiful new discovery channel for published content, helping publishers and societies strengthen their support for authors in the increasingly key area of broader audiences and impacts; in a 2020 survey of over 10,000 researchers, 95% agreed they need to achieve broader impacts among audiences such as policy makers, educators, the media and public.
Kudos Showcases will maximize and broaden readership for authors, while also providing a powerful new channel for building publisher, journal and society brands; they can be created for specific topics, journals or other content collections to help a publisher or society build its reputation in key areas. Kudos is also taking a lead in how it categorizes content, and will offer users a range of filters by which to browse – from basic groupings such as academic subject area, to newer approaches such as UN Sustainable Development Goals. This reflects emerging best practice in how users seek information, and helps to demonstrate the contribution that authors, journals, books and publishers are making to resolving “grand challenges”.
“This is a powerful new service from Kudos,” comments Ted Bakamjian, Associate Executive Director, Publications and Communities, Society of Exploration Geophysicists, one of the first publishing societies to have adopted the Showcase. “Our authors and editors are thrilled to be helping nonacademic readers, in particular, find and engage with our content in a way that feels more comfortable for someone less familiar with technical content platforms. This reimagining of how we connect with those audiences will be one of the key ways in which we help our authors fulfill growing expectations around broader outreach and impact.”
Showcases are compiled from plain language metadata created by authors using Kudos’ toolkits. The nonspecialist language that researchers use when explaining their work via Kudos helps broader audiences discover the Showcases. Kudos is used by over 375,000 researchers all over the world, so most publishers and societies already have a huge range of summarized articles ready to prepopulate an attractive showcase. No technical setup is required and a showcase can be turned on almost instantly for a subscribing publisher.
Visually, Kudos Publisher Showcases take their design cue from mainstream platforms such as Pinterest or Medium, using “cards” to present content in an appealing and responsive layout, displaying elegantly on large or small screens. Banner images help to reinforce publisher or society branding, while featured images and an uncluttered layout make each publication card more striking and memorable.
For interest from Asia-Pacific, contact ies Research.
The press release in full is here.
