Universities are increasingly moving towards recognising digital scholarship despite conflicting messages that favour traditional publishing in journals

"This focus on traditional publishing outlets is reinforced by exercises such as the REF, which have a clear bias towards these kinds of outputs. As money flows as a result of the REF, this inevitably has a tendency to concentrate efforts in these outlets. But there is momentum growing behind the idea of digital scholarship as a viable alternative to the monopoly of previous practice. A big factor in this is the idea of impact. The work of open access publishers has demonstrated that articles made freely available under open access tend to have a bigger readership and are cited more frequently. This led to a number of research funders mandating that any outcomes of their research should be made openly available. But funders are now looking beyond the standard citation metrics to broader webometrics to measure impact. If a blog post, YouTube video or podcast is the output that is really achieving impact, then research funders want to encourage and reward this. Similarly, universities are realising that their online reputation is their main brand, that the glossy brochure is not how they attract students now. Being recognised as a university that has online savvy staff is the new equivalent of having TV celebrity academics...."