Kudos: building readership by explaining and sharing - at FORCE 2016

Researchers and scholars are increasingly encouraged / eager to increase the visibility, reach and impact of their work. It’s not easy to know which of the available communications options (email, social media, academic networks, etc) will actually help to increase readership of your publications. Kudos is trying to help with this challenge, by providing a central platform from which to manage your outreach (whichever media you prefer) and by mapping your communications efforts against a range of metrics (views, downloads, altmetrics, citations). Kudos also acts as a hub for explaining your article in plain language, to make work more (linguistically) accessible – to non-specialists (whether in adjacent disciplines or even outside academia) or to speakers of other languages. Kudos aims to optimize your time by showing which activities and channels are most effective for increasing readership of research; we also aim to level the playing field so that all researchers and scholars have access to a simple, standard toolkit for helping increase the visibility and reach of their work, regardless of where they publish or what institution they are affiliated with. We launched our service last year and it is already used (for free) by over 80,000 researchers and scholars around the world; we provide services to publishers and institutions so they can better support researchers’ efforts, and can shape their own marketing and PR support in line with the most effective activities and channels at an aggregate level.<br>