Innovations in Scholarly Communication

A number of services are available to University of Edinburgh staff and students which can help provide information about how research and publications are communicated and used. These services can be used in different ways to broaden the reach of research and to help provide evidence of its dissemination and impact.

Academia.edu

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. Despite the educational top-level domain name, Academia.edu is a start up company with £14.5 million worth of venture capital investment raised over four funding rounds. 

Academics can use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of researchers they follow. Over 31 million academics have signed up to Academia.edu, adding over 9 million papers and 1.8 million research interests. Academia.edu attracts over 36 million unique visitors a month.

https://www.academia.edu/

Altmetric.com

Altmetric.com is subscription service which provides article-level metrics about how research is referenced and shared in a range of social media and in the news.  The College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine and the College of Science and Engineering have renewed the subscription for a further year  - details below:  

Altmetric.com subscription

For support in using this service, or to provide feedback, please contact scholcomms@ed.ac.uk.

Authorea

Authorea is an online collaborative writing tool, similar to Google Docs, that enables academic authors to write documents together and attach references, figures, data, and source code. Useful features include the ability for multiple users to edit a document at the same time, text can be annotated with public or private comments and co-authors can chat online while writing.

https://www.authorea.com/

Figshare

Figshare is an online digital repository where researchers can upload and share their research outputs, including figures, datasets, images, and videos. It is free to upload content and free to access, in adherence to the principle of open data. 

https://figshare.com/

Kudos

Kudos is a service that helps researchers and their institutions and funders to maximize the visibility and impact of their published articles. Kudos provides a platform for assembling and creating information to help search filtering, for sharing information to drive discovery, and for measuring and monitoring the effect of these activities.  Kudos is free to use for researchers who want assistance with increasing usage of and citations to their publications. An institutional package is also available, but the University of Edinburgh does not currently subscribe to this.

https://www.growkudos.com/

Overleaf

Overleaf is another web-based, real-time collaborative writing and publishing platform, which allows you to edit directly in LaTeX or with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor. It has been optimised for mobile devices so works really well on tablets or mobile phones.

https://www.overleaf.com/

ResearchGate

ResearchGate is a social networking site for researchers and academics.  It is another start-up company, that has so far received £70 million from venture capital investors, seeking to find a business model to support itself. ResearchGate is free to use and enables researchers to share publications, get statistics about who has been reading papers, and connect and collaborate with peers.

https://www.researchgate.net/

ScienceOpen

ScienceOpen is an independent start-up company that provides a free to use discovery platform designed for researchers. Useful features include smart filters, topical collections and feedback from the academic community to help find relevant new content in your chosen subject area.

http://blog.scienceopen.com/category/about-so/

The Scholarly Communications Team remains committed to supporting staff and students at all stages of their careers with best practice in research communications.  Please contact us to arrange a visit to your department or a bespoke consultancy meeting.