» The Impact of Social Media on the Dissemination of Research: Results of an Experiment Journal of Digital Humanities

"In September 2011 I returned to work after a year on maternity leave. Many things needed sorting out, not least my digital presence at my home institution, which had switched to a content management system that seamlessly linked to University College London’s open-access repository, “Discovery.” The idea was we should upload open-access versions of all our previously published research, and link to it from our home pages, to aid in dissemination. There is no doubt that this type of administrative task is tedious. To break up the monotony of digging out the last previous version prior to publication of my 26 journal papers (we put up a last-but-one copy to get around copyright issues with journals) I decided to blog the process. I wrote a post about each paper, or each research project that had spawned papers. I wanted to tell the stories behind the research — the things that don’t get into the published versions. I also set about methodically tweeting about these research papers, as they went live, going through my back catalogue in reverse chronological order. What became clear to me very quickly was the correlation between talking about my research online and the spike in downloads of my papers from our institutional repository. A game that had spurred me to carry out an administrative task was actually disseminating my research quite effectively. So this, in turn, became the focus of the blog posts that are featured here. The first, 'What Happens When You Tweet an Open-Access Paper' discusses the correlation between talking about an individual paper online, and seeing its downloads increase. The second, 'Is Blogging and Tweeting About Research Papers Worth It? The Verdict' discusses the overall effect of this process on all my papers, highlighting what I think the benefits of open access are. In the final post, 'When Was the Last Time You Asked How Your Published Research Was Doing?' I talk about the link between publishers and open access, and how little we know about how often our research is accessed once it is published. More than 20,000 people have now read these three online posts. It is evident to me that academics need to work on their digital presence to aid in the dissemination of their research, to both their subject peers and the wider community. These blog posts provide the evidence to prove this..."