Impact of Social Sciences – Don’t let publication be the end of the story – transforming research into an illustrated abstract

"Publishing research that can be accessed as widely as possible is clearly crucial, but ensuring that research is accessible to similarly large groups of people is an altogether different challenge. The CC BY license, required by many funders when publishing open access, permits users to transform and build upon the licensed content, creating something new and original. Lucy Lambe explains how the LSE Library has worked with a comics creator and illustrator to create illustrated abstracts of articles that were funded to publish open access last year. This proved a rewarding experience for artist and authors, as well as an effective way of elucidating complex concepts. The development of the global open access movement has seen a sharp rise in the number of journal articles made freely available either through institutional repositories (green OA) or directly from publishers (gold OA). And evidence shows that this content is indeed being accessed – IRUS (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) has recorded over 130 million downloads from UK institutional repositories since 2012, with our own LSE Research Online registering more than 2 million full-text downloads in 2017 alone. We’re also increasingly able to see how this content is being used – by researchers and others beyond the academy – through tools like the Request a copy button, Harvard’s “Your Story Matters”, and the Open Access Button. As open access publishing becomes the norm for many researchers, we can start to think about accessibility and how well this scholarship is communicated to the general public. At the LSE Library we have recently experimented with transforming open access articles into cartoon abstracts. The Creative Commons (CC BY) license, required by many funders when publishing open access, not only means that articles can be freely accessed and shared by anyone but also that those articles can be transformed and built upon, used to create something new and original. Our project involved commissioning illustrated abstracts to promote the School’s RCUK block grant and open access fund for OA journals...."