Kudos, the award-winning platform for managing research dissemination, has announced 6 month results of its new shareable PDF (S-PDF) service. The S-PDF provides researchers with a means to write and share a high-level overview for each of their publications, giving the broader context of their work and helping improve discoverability and understanding by a wide audience. It also provides a means for authors and participating publishers to understand the relative efficacy of a variety of platforms and channels in driving views and usage of articles, books and book chapters.
The soda PDF comprises bibliographic information, a plain language summary, and a link to the publisher version of record. The S-PDF is a complement to other initiatives designed to help researchers improve copyright-compliant visibility for their work on scholarly collaboration networks and via other PDF-based sharing platforms and media.
Kudos launched the S-PDF towards the end of 2017 following publisher consultation and research with our userbase of researchers (now at over 225,000). In the 6 months since the service launched:
- 15 publishershave signed up to switch on the new S-PDF feature and enable their authors to use Kudos for managing their PDF-based sharing.
- The most recent publishers to sign up are Wiley, the American Meteorological Society,IWA Publishing, the Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, Trans Tech Publications, and Tsinghua University Press.
- S-PDF has immediately become the most popular mechanism for sharingvia Kudos, with 61% of authors choosing to use S-PDF to share their work, when offered it by their publisher
- S-PDF has substantiallyincreased the number of authors sharing (via any channel), with more than twice as many authors now sharing their work for those publishers participating in S-PDF.
- The number of publications being shared (via any channel) has also more than doubledsince the option was made live.
“We’re extremely happy with the rate at which authors have adopted S-PDF,” says Charlie Rapple, Sales & Marketing Director and Co-founder of Kudos. “Of course, we knew that PDF-based sharing was very popular, but couldn’t have anticipated that our new approach to this would be such an immediate success. We’ve clearly tapped into authors’ need for a central picture of engagement with their work, that enables the different platforms and media they use for sharing to be compared on a like for like basis. We’re also delighted to see so many publishers taking a pragmatic, researcher-oriented approach to making PDF-based sharing work for everyone.”
Melinda Kenneway, Executive Director of Kudos, adds, “What Kudos offers here is unique – a tool that researchers can use to create a simple PDF that explains the context and significance of each of their publications in accessible language. This is a valuable service, regardless of whether that work is open access or behind a subscription wall; it’s also entirely complementary with other initiatives underway to support responsible sharing. By including a trackable link within each S-PDF based on publisher access rules, authors are free to share information about their publications wherever they wish, knowing that copyright is automatically dealt with. Following our work to fully integrate Kudos with manuscript tracking systems, publishers can now embed this new author service deep into their workflow, helping optimize take-up and resulting exposure of participating publishers’ content and brands across multiple networks.”
The Kudos shareable PDF is now available for any publisher who wishes to activate this feature, whether a current Kudos customer or not. If you would like to switch on shareable PDF for your content, please contact charlie.a.rapple@growkudos.com.
