You've published your research article. Now who's going to read it?

The Royal Society of Chemistry and Taylor & Francis are supporting a pilot programme with Kudos, a start-up that provides tools and services to help researchers maximise the usage and impact of published articles.

The need for Kudos arises from developments in global academic and research policies that will increasingly see evolving interpretations of 'impact' used to assess researcher excellence. Publishers already invest editorial, marketing and technological expertise in making research articles discoverable and useful, and now Kudos will further support this by helping leverage the expertise and connections of researchers themselves to further drive visibility and usage. 

"We're excited to be involved at such an early stage of Kudos' development," says Meloney Bartlett, Head of Journal Publishing at the Royal Society of Chemistry. "We're seeking to understand how we can support our authors in building their visibility, and further increase the impact of their work, and the pilot with Kudos will help us do that."

Melinda Kenneway, a publishing consultant who co-founded Kudos with fellow consultants David Sommer and Charlie Rapple, says: "The growing range of article metrics is driving authors to take a greater interest in how their work performs after publication. 

"But at the moment, authors are limited in what they can do to help improve the discoverability and readership of their work, and this is where Kudos will help."

Kudos aims to provide a highly automated, scalable service to help researchers and their institutions measure, monitor and maximize the usage of and citations to their published articles, always linking back to the publishers' authoritative version. Kudos also aims to broaden access and enable "strategic reading" by assisting authors in articulating the context of their published work, and enriching it with links to related resources.

Ian Bannerman, Managing Director of publisher Taylor & Francis, adds, "This is a compelling and timely initiative which fits well with T&F's wider support for authors and their institutions. We're looking forward to testing a number of ideas to identify those that are most effective and useful across a range of subject areas."

David Sommer from Kudos explains that the launch period is effectively a research experiment. He says: "At this stage, we have a range of ideas that may help researchers and their institutions increase the readership and impact of their published articles. The pilot phase allows us to test and measure the effectiveness of these ideas with real data and authors, to help us shape the ongoing development of the Kudos service."