1. Creating impact for your research after
publication: City Research Online and
social networking
Neil Stewart, Digital Repository Manager
Neil.Stewart.1@city.ac.uk
http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/

2. Session overview
• Scholarly communication in the internet age
• Open access: a hot topic!
• Open access at City: City Research Online
• Social networking: a new form of scholarly
communications, or a frivolous waste of time?
• Twitter, blogs & other social media
• Open access & social media: power dissemination!
• Conclusions

3. Scholarly communication in the web age
• The web as a classic disruptive technology - and these effects
are still playing out.
• Knowledge can now be freely disseminated via the web.
• Goodbye to the library as the gatekeeper for scholarly
knowledge.
• Traditional models of publishing (subscription journals, hard
copy monographs) under threat as a result.
• New methods of scholarly communications gaining currency e.g.
ebooks, open educational resources, open access journals.
• Problems of authority and authenticity of information.
• Social media as a dissemination tool or a medium in its own
right?

4. Open access (OA): a hot topic!
• General (reductive) idea: taxpayer funded research should be
accessible to all (and in particular all academics).
• “Green” and “Gold” routes to OA.
• The OA citation advantage.
• A lot of publicity around OA recently:
• The Elsevier boycott.
• Government moves to ensure the Research Councils ensure
research outputs are made OA.
• The Guardian and other prominent media outlets have been
examining OA issues.
• What does all this mean for researchers?
• Likely that the Research Councils will mandate OA as a condition of
funding- and enforce this mandate!

5. Open access at City: City Research Online
• Institutional repository service launched in Autumn 2011.
• Allows City authors to make their research
(articles, chapters, conference papers, theses) available to
anyone who wishes to access it via Green OA– author self-
archiving.
• To do this, all we need is the “author final” version of papers-
the final, post-refereeing draft.
• We do the copyright checking on your behalf.
• Papers added to CRO get found and downloaded- we recently
broke the 100 downloads a day barrier, we have had downloads
from c. 86 countries in the last month alone!
• See for example
http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/582/, http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/5
01/

6. Social media- blogging
• A new form of academic communication?
• Quick & easy to set up a blog!
• Allows for peer interaction, can find an
audience outside the academy.
• Can contextualise research for new and wider
audiences.
• Problems: finding the time, creating an
audience.

7. Social media- Twitter
• Short, timely updates on relevant topics.
• Conversational model.
• Know your audience! Possibility of mixed
messages.
• Hashtagging your Tweets.
• Some examples of good practice here at City:
@giCentre, @cityuni_hcid, @CityLCS
• Also possible to build personal networks, e.g.
@WebsterFrank

8. Case study: it really works!
• Melissa Terras, UCL Department of Information Studies.
• Made a concerted effort to blog & Tweet about her papers
which had been added to UCL’s institutional repository service.
• Most papers had received one or two downloads; after
publicising, this rose to an average of 70 downloads per paper.
• As a result, she achieved 27 of the top 50 most downloaded
papers in her department that month.
“If you tell people about your research, they look at it. Your
research will get looked at more than papers which are not
promoted via social media.”
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/04/19/blog-tweeting-papers-worth-it/

9. Further reading
That LSE blog from my last slide:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/
Impact of Social Sciences Handbook:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/the-handbook/
A guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact
activities:
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/09/29/twitter-guide/
Social media: A guide for researchers: http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-
work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/social-media-guide-
researchers

10. Thanks!
Email: Neil.Stewart.1@city.ac.uk
Tweet: @neilstewart
CRO’s email address: publications@city.ac.uk
CRO’s OA repository: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/
CRO’s on City’s website: http://www.city.ac.uk/research/research-
publications
CRO on Twitter: @City_Research
CRO’s blog: http://cityopenaccess.wordpress.com/
City’s Social Media Officer Sabrina Francis:
Sabrina.Francis.1@city.ac.uk