The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Open Access Research Communicators

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Open Access Research Communicators

The emergence of Web 2.0 and simultaneously Library 2.0 platforms has helped the library and information professionals to outreach to new audiences beyond their physical boundaries. In a globalized knowledge society, information becomes very useful resource for socio-economic empowerment of marginalized communities, economic prosperity of common citizens, and knowledge enrichment of liberated minds. Scholarly information becomes both developmental and functional for researchers working towards advancement of knowledge. We must recognize a relay of information flow and information ecology while pursuing scholarly research. Published scholarly literatures we consult that help us in creation of new knowledge. Similarly, our published scholarly works should be outreached to future researchers for regeneration of next dimension of knowledge. Fortunately, present day research communicators have many freely available personalized digital tools to outreach to global research audiences having similar research interests. These tools and techniques, already adopted by many researchers in different subject areas across the world, should be enthusiastically utilized by LIS researchers for global dissemination of their scholarly research works. This newly found enthusiasm will soon become integral part of the positive habits and cultural practices of research communicators in LIS domain.

To stay productive and competitive, individual researchers must commit to transforming themselves into full digital communicators. Here are the seven habits that successful research communicators share: 

1. Create your unique author ID, an identifier for global researchers engaged in academic research. You may use ResearcherID.com or ORCID.org or both for generating your unique identifier. After registering for your unique identifier, upload your list of publications and make your profile public both in ResearcherID.com and ORCID.org.

2. Create your own researcher profile in a dedicated website or personalized webpage and provide up-to-date information about your scholarly research works. This will include list of your publications, presentations, research awards, recognitions, travel grants, research projects, latest published works, and professional or creative credentials. You may also create your personalized profile in a blog, using services of Blogger.com or Wordpress.com.

3. Create a researcher profile in academic social networks. Examples of most popular academic social networks are Academia.edu, ResearchGate.net, getCITED.org, SSRN.com, SlideShare.net, Linkedin.com, SkillShare.com, etc. Majority of these academic social networks have provisions of self-archiving of research papers by their registered users. Your deposited works are searchable within these platforms and also from the academic search engines such as Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, or BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine.

4. Share your published works in OA repositories, and also in academic social networks. Subject-specific OA repositories and institutional repositories are effective points of dissemination for published scholarly works. In the LIS field, E-LIS Repository (E-LIS: Eprints in Library and Information Science, Eprints.rclis.org) is very effective OA subject repository, similar to arXiv.org in physical and computer sciences. While making your published works open access, you should also make your empirical research data available to global researchers through open data repositories. If your institution does not maintain any institutional open data repository, you can self-archive your research data into FigShare.com or DataDryad.org. There are online services for cross searching OA knowledge repositories at the global level. One such service is the OAISter (OAIster.org), maintained by OCLC Inc. It indexes metadata from institutional, disciplinary and national-level OA knowledge repositories across the globe. If you have self-archived any of your published work in any OA repository, you can retrieve the relevant information from OAISter database. Similarly, share your delivered lecture notes and lecture slides with Slideshare.net or Speakerdeck.com. Self-archiving is also possible in academic social networks by their registered users. Your deposited works in OA repositories or academic social networks are searchable from the academic search engines.

5. Create your profile in Google Scholar Citations and regularly track citations of your published papers. Google Scholar Citations (GSC) shows your h-index and i10-index scores, list of your publications and number of citations each one received. You need to register for GSC profile, upload your list of publications and make your GSC profile public. Similarly, also create your profile in ImpactStory.org for knowing research impact of your published papers, presentations or shared research data. However, ImpactStory.org has recently migrated to paid service model encouraging budding researchers to subscribe their service.

6. Participate in email-based discussion forums in your specialized area and discuss your research ideas or works in progress. Many scientific societies, associations of scholars and graduate schools run their dedicated email-based discussion forums, which are also known as listservs. Work in progress is a set of ongoing research projects. You may also promote published papers by circulating bibliographic information of your recently published papers. Share complete bibliographic information with abstracts and mention its DOI or URI. Don't attach full-text contents with your email, only correct URI or DOI can assist the interested members to locate your papers. 

7.  Make use of free online citation and reference managers. You may use EndNote Web, Mendeley, CiteULike, Zotero, Google Scholar Citations Library, or ProQuest's Flow, or combination of some of them, for generating and sharing your reference lists and subject bibliographies. Save and share your references online for accessing anytime and anywhere by you and other members in your dedicated groups. Your references, citations and sometimes full-text contents are accessible in cloud platforms through online reference managers.

Written By

 Anup Kumar Das

Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Further Details:

• Das, Anup Kumar (2014). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Research Communicators. In: Charaibeti: Golden Jubilee Commemorative Volume (pp. 356-365). Kolkata, India: Department of Library and Information Science, Jadavpur University. ISBN: 9788192988603.