 Hello, I'm Tony O'Rourke, Consultant for Strategic Alliances within Argo and I'm here today with Charlie Rappel who's co-founder as well as Sales and Marketing Director of QDOS. Charlie is also Associate Theatre Editor of Learned Publishing, which is the Journal of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers and that journals published together with the Society of Psychology Publishing. QDOS is a web-based service that helps researchers and their institutions and funders to maximise the visibility and impact of their published articles and research. QDOS provides a platform for assembling and creating information to help search filtering, for sharing information to drive discovery and for measuring and monitoring the effects of these activities. In today's interview, we'll be discussing the need for services like QDOS as well as their impact for both early stage researchers as well as experience researchers in countries such as Japan, Korea and China. Charlie will be sharing the importance and relevance of QDOS in today's publishing industry and the advantages of using it for researchers. She'll be sharing how QDOS has had an impact for researchers globally and some of the highlights of QDOS over the last few years. The interview, this interview, is a continuation of an interview series called Connecting Scholarly Publishing Experts and Researchers. So Charlie, hello. Hello. Can you share the initial idea behind QDOS? Yeah, there were a number of different themes that seemed to come together at the time when we set up QDOS. My co-founders and I had all been working in the scholarly communications industry and tackling a lot of the same issues, much more research being published and the challenges for researchers themselves in making sure that their works were finding an audience, but also as readers trying to digest growing amounts of literature and keep up with the important developments in your space. We were also at a time when metrics were really taking off in new ways. So the digital publishing mechanisms had enabled metrics to be calculated at article level and there was a growing interest, not only in article of a metric such as downloads, but also the growth in alternative metrics that looked at the attention being paid to work in social media and in government policy and Wikipedia and so on. So there were lots of different aspects of change in our community that inspired us to think about how could we help researchers perform better against these metrics, ensure that their work was finding an audience and ultimately that it was having the impact required to help them in their constant pursuit for funding. And I guess that was the final aspect of it, that funding has become such a more competitive space over the last few years. There's been less funding, more people looking to get at it. So we were trying to help people ensure that they and their work were performing in a way that would help them stand out and help them gain more funding. So QDOS is free for the research community? Yeah, absolutely. So what are the primary benefits for researchers to use QDOS? Lots really. I mean, as you say, it's free and it doesn't take long. It's a very easy service to use because a big part of what we as specialists in marketing and product development wanted to do was make a service that would be very simple, a workflow that really cut out a lot of different aspects and focused on what would really help improve the performance of your work. And it really does work. There was an independent study earlier this year of the first couple of years worth of data that we'd build up that showed that when researchers use QDOS to explain and share their work, they can achieve something in the order of 23 percent more downloads for their work. And of course, downloads are at the heart of any other kind of impact. You know, before you can have citations, people need to read your work before there can be online discussion and other kinds of impact. People need to read it. So growing readership is the main focus of what we're trying to help people do. OK. So what are the prerequisites in for a researcher before they start using QDOS? Very little, really. One aspect of the system is that it's currently based around CrossRef DOIs. Now, five thousand publishers assign CrossRef DOIs. Many of the most of the outlets in which researchers will be publishing will be assigning a CrossRef DOI. So that's the only real prerequisite. And for most people, that's not going to be a problem. And as soon as there's a CrossRef DOI, you can find your work in our system and you can take our three simple steps to increasing its readership. So, Charlie, can you give me some examples of where QDOS has made a difference? Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the study that I mentioned that shows on an aggregate level, people's use of QDOS is correlated to 23 percent higher downloads. We get some fabulous stories of actually what that's meant for individuals. Couple that spring to mind. One is a geological researcher who had not published very much. So I think this was her second paper that had come out of her PhD. And she had recently published it. She explained it on QDOS in fantastic, simple plain language explanation that even helped a layperson like me understand the nature of her research. And then she posted a tweet out. In fact, she posted three or four tweets over a series of time. She's now achieved over a thousand views of her work on QDOS. And this has really excited her. She's tweeted since then, saying what a great insight that's given her into the fact that there are people out there reading her work, even her at the early stage of her career. And my favorite comment that she said was that this is getting her excited about her research again, because she can see there's this wider audience rather than feeling a little bit alone in a vacuum with it. And another really interesting story was somebody who was using a feature on QDOS that enables you to add links to related works that in many cases have come into existence after publication. And so there's no other way in which they're connected to your publication. In his case, he was trawling the web, looking for a couple of things that he wanted to link in that way and discovered something, somebody else using his data in a really interesting way, building on his work that he hadn't known about previously. So the process of explaining and sharing his work by QDOS actually caused him to come across a new collaborator who he's then gone on and done some more work with. So there's all sorts of really interesting stories like that. And people are very excited in telling us about their successes and about their experiences with the service. So there's been some pretty exciting benefits for researchers. What about the stakeholders like universities, journal, publishers, funders? Yeah, I mean, the wonder of what we're doing is that by encouraging researchers to do their explaining and sharing it through a central system, we're then building up a massive data set that can then be interrogated and used by institutions, publishers, funders, societies, anybody else with an interest in the success of that work and who can then support the researcher and collaborate through QDOS with the researcher in building up the impact of that work. We work with 70 publishers and they're doing all sorts of exciting things in terms of tapping into these plain language explanations, reusing those on publisher websites to increase discoverability there, acknowledging and interacting with the researchers' communications around their work and helping those to reach a broader audience. So it's a wonderful way to make sure that everybody's efforts in pursuit of this common goal are all managed through a central system so you can build on each of those efforts. And where publishers and institutions might separately have been doing press releases and things before. Now they can all work together and see whose effects are gaining traction. They can also, at that publisher and institutional level, look at the aggregate level of across all the authors or researchers that I'm affiliated with, which channels are proving most effective, who's having most impact and start to understand a lot more in an evidence based way about how best to communicate around research which can shape their own activities and ensure that they save time and do things in a more effective way, but also critically shape the guidance that they give to researchers. And of course they can do that kind of analysis at a regional level as well so they can look at what's working better for our authors in China or what's working better for our authors in Russia and provide different kinds of guidance based on evidence rather than the world that existed previously where people were experimenting with different kinds of communications but didn't really have the detailed insight or the way of joining the dots between communications activities and publications metrics. So it was very difficult previously to know what was actually working. QDOS solves that problem for everybody. So where has QDOS established itself? Which regions has it established itself? And we're both marketing professionals. I'd be interested to know how you've reached those target audiences. Around the world very much. So we now have over 100,000 researchers using the service and I think about 23% of those are in Asia, for example, 8% in India, 5% in China. So there's a lot of audiences around the world who recognise this common need to build the impact of their work. We've mostly reached them in the first instance through our publisher partnerships. So I mentioned we're working with 70 publishers and they are inviting all of their authors at the point of publication or indeed often inviting authors of backfile content to come and explain and share that work. But we're also now starting to run our own campaigns directly to researchers. Now that we have good evidence for why the system is worth using and a little bit more brand visibility, we can start to engage directly with researchers. We're running a fantastic campaign at the moment called Mobilise Research, which is designed to encourage researchers to embrace this idea of broadening the audience, encouraging them to support the idea that their work deserves that broader audience. And encouraging them to share via QDOS or even just to tweet using that hashtag Mobilise Research. And that's already proven to be very successful at increasing awareness and uptake of our service. So we'll be doing a lot more of that work directly with researchers as well as continuing our work through publishers and institutions. And so I'm interested to find out more about this broader audience. How has QDOS helped with global visibility researchers and their work? I think there's a lot of different ways in which we're trying to help with that challenge. One is that in encouraging people to explain their work in plain language, that just by itself is making that work more accessible in a linguistic sense to more people. So whether it's people outside your specialist area of work or whether it's speakers of other languages, you're helping simplify your explanation of the work so that more people can understand it. And of course, those plain language explanations also lend themselves more readily to auto translation so that if anybody does find them and still can't quite understand them, it's much easier to put that into an online search engine and get a meaningful result than if you were to put perhaps the original abstract in, which might be too dense and technical to really work well in a translation mode. But of course, these plain language explanations also in using a different language are also just actually making that work more discoverable through search engines and things because now a different range of search terms will find that work than the original abstract, which will again have discipline specific language that may not be the language that everybody is using to search for it. Thank you. The last 10 years in publishing has been really interesting and we've almost seen this kind of parallel industry being created, publishing services industry being created. I'm interested to know from your perspective, how long do you think it's going to be before researchers start to embrace resources such as Kudos? I think when you look back exactly as you say over the last few years, researchers have been really quick to embrace a lot of aspects of these new developments. So they were very quick to start using online journals, for example, very quick to embrace reference linking and things like that. In certain communities, you already see quite a lot of uptake. I think probably actually all kids, for example, the the identifier for researchers that helps disambiguate between authors with the same name. That has obviously taken off, particularly in some countries, where the issue of people having the same name is more common. So I think there are already pockets of widespread uptake. I think it will be perhaps only five years before everybody's using orchid. Everybody's aware of Altmetric and looking at that. Everybody's trying to take an active approach to increasing the impact of their work with a toolkit like Kudos. Is there a geographic bias that you see more take up in some countries compared to others? I think based on our data, it would be hard to make that judgment because obviously the nature of how we've rolled the service out means that we would obviously have a bias in some countries where we've worked with more publishers in the UK and US. So obviously we've got higher levels of sign up among authors in those countries. I think the fact that our usage outside of those countries, like, for example, Asia, which has just overtaken the US as in terms of the numbers of people signed up for Kudos, I think that demonstrates that there is enormous appetite for what we're doing and we just need to work more closely and approach more directly people in those countries to tell them about what we're doing. And once they learn about us, they typically do sign up quite quickly. I mean, Kudos is still a relatively young product, young service, I should say. And what have been the highlights of Kudos since you launched? You're right. I mean, we've really only been around for two, two and a half years. And exactly. And in that time, so much has happened. A massive highlight for us actually was about this time last year, we won the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing, which was a huge testimonial, a huge endorsement of the need for something like Kudos and that we had got the model right in terms of what we were doing and that it was making a difference. So that that was a fantastic sense of endorsement by our peers and people who really are qualified to judge whether what we're doing is worthwhile. But there have been lots of other exciting moments along the way. A little bit before that, we'd won some government funding from the UK government, which was again a real, really difficult process, actually, to go through. And there was no guarantee at all that we would be successful. So that was a real highlight when we were successful in that respect. And then more recently, actually, one of the big highlights for this year for me has been a piece about us in nature when we were added to the Nature Toolbox, which looks at tools that are available to help researchers of all types. And they took a very close and rigorous look at what we were doing and the ways in which it was helping and spoke to lots of different people and some really great supportive comments came from the people that they spoke to. It was very exciting to be talked about in such a prestigious publication. That's fantastic. Well, what about research funders and research institutions? How is Kudos being used by that sector to track the impact of the research that they're funding? Obviously, they're very interested in watching very closely what we're doing. We've begun working with institutions already. We've just actually in the last few weeks signed an agreement with JISC, which manages the procurement of content mostly, but also increasingly services like ours in the UK. And that is exciting in that it again shows that there is an institutional recognition of what we're doing and the need for what we're doing. And so we're looking forward to rolling out our institutional services more widely. And as part of the process of gaining that JISC agreement, it encouraged us to totally rethink the way we were pricing our service for institutions around the world as well. So actually, although that's a new case specific deal, the benefits of that will be felt by institutions around the world. And on the funding side as well, we have a lot of conversations on the go. A lot of people watching very closely what we're doing and very interested everybody benefits if you can centralise and manage and surface in a central way, researchers, communications about their work. There is so much to be gained from that intelligence. And that's a data set that just hasn't existed previously. Everybody can benefit from that. For funders, it's really interesting to just be able to see which of the people you fund are actually taking active steps to do undertake outreach around their work and what effect is that having and how does that influence the metrics and so on. So that's really important intelligence. And we do see a lot of interest from funders and universities. Very interesting. What new features do you see coming up in Kudos over the coming months and years? We have such a full roadmap for development, as you can imagine. It would take us through many years, but lots of really exciting things there. I mean, it ranges from some quite high end things like taking the product or the idea of the product that we developed for publishers and institutions and starting to repurpose that for societies, for example, who can then start to use the intelligence in Kudos to help them with everything from kind of supporting current members to actually seeking out potential new members. We're also working with people in the corporate sector who are very interested to track how research that might refer to their products is being discussed in the literature. So there's a lot of kind of big, big developments like that. But all the time we're undertaking kind of incremental improvements of how we do things. And a big theme for us in that respect at the moment is what we're calling actionable insights, which is taking us from a quite report based system at the moment. Where all the intelligence is there, you can download it, you can pivot it a little bit and manipulate it a little bit. But ultimately, you've got to then join the dots in terms of what that means for you. We're starting to do some of that thinking for people and heading towards being able to give people what we call action cards so that you could log into the site and it will present you with a series of five or six things that with a couple of clicks you can act on those. So we're telling you what this intelligence means for you and what you need to do with it to improve the engagement with your work or the impact of your work. And that will be across all the different customer groups that we serve, that kind of approach to boiling down that intelligence to make it even quicker, even easier for people to take advantage of it and act on it rather than requiring people to have to figure out what to do with it for themselves. In a relatively short period of time, Kudos in less than three years you say Kudos has established itself as a cool brand within the scholarly communication industry. What are your future plans? We've certainly achieved a lot in a small amount of time with that. But we're not oblivious to the fact that there's a lot more to do. So I think one thing I'd really like to see us doing is extending the reach of that brand in the research community. I think we're very well known in the publishing world and increasingly so in the institutional and funder and society world. But the research world is obviously much bigger and there's many more individuals that we would like to be able to connect with. And I think particularly we'd like to be able to expand our connection with researchers in Asia and in some of the other countries that have less developed research infrastructures and where people are struggling much harder to achieve impact with their work. They're doing great research, but they're struggling to gain the visibility that that deserves on the international stage. And I see that we could have a really big role in helping them to take ownership of that, have simple tools to help them work their way through simple processes to increase the visibility of their work and therefore gain the recognition that they deserve. Excellent. So my last question you'll be pleased to hear. In today's environment is a real drive amongst publishers and journals to promote research through a variety of different platforms. But researchers themselves are often reluctant or reticent to use or to adopt these new platforms and trends. What's Kudos doing to come to the rescue of these researchers? That was certainly something we were really conscious of from the very beginnings of our discussions around this toolkit was it's got to be easy and it's got to show people that their efforts are worthwhile and it's got there's got to be hardly any distance between those two things. They need to move quickly from undertaking an action to seeing the results of that action. And that really drove so many aspects of the development of the product and the interfaces and the data sources that we sought for it and the processes that we developed within it. And I think that has been the secret to a lot of our success so far and the speed with which we've been able to gain traction is because we brought together data that previously was really time consuming for people to go and look for it, even to know that it existed and to pull it all together and try and make sense of. And we now have a really simple graph that just shows you this is the point at which you sent out a social media posting about your work and this is what happened to the readership of your work or to the discussion of your work online or to the citations around your work and taking out a lot of the noise, taking out a lot of the effort involved creating a really simple workflow so that people could quickly in five minutes explain their work, get them the trackable link for sharing it and then come back only hours later and see the results that they'd achieved and all the mechanisms we've wrapped around that in terms of emailing them and encouraging them to be able to see that. I think that's what's made it work for us and that's the way in which we're different to a lot of the other systems that people are being asked to use which don't have such a clear benefit for researchers or even if there is a clear benefit, they haven't been able to demonstrate it so demonstrably, that's been a focus from us from the outset and I think that's why so many people have adopted the service that we've created. Charlie Repel, thank you very much. Tony O'Rourke, thank you very much. Well, thank you to the Inago Academy for asking me some questions today about QDOS. I've really enjoyed thinking through some of the aspects of what we've discussed and I really hope that we can soon help a lot of the researchers and authors who are in Japan, South Korea, China and many of the other countries who are seeking to increase the impact of your work. So in summary, if you're a researcher based in any country but particularly markets, big research economies such as China or Japan, South Korea, and you're interested in giving your research the best possible chance of global visibility, then I would urge you to look at QDOS as a service for yourself and for your organisation.