How can you build trust online and promote yourself and your research? In a poster presented at the recent SGUL annual Research Day, we highlighted some commonly used tools to manage and curate your research profile online, along with some pros and cons of each one.
In this blog we give you some more background and things to think about when considering your scholarly and professional identity online, to help you pick the tools that are right for you, starting with the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID).
ORCID
ORCID is a unique persistent identifier for researchers. Signing up to ORCID helps to distinguish you from other researchers and connects you with your achievements. It is simple to sign up for an ORCID, although it is possible to run into difficulties.This blog post from UK ORCID Support outlines some of the weird and wonderful ways some researchers have used these IDs – and how to put things right, for instance if you have managed to register for more than one ID: ORCIDs in the Wild: A Field Guide to the Popular Persistent Identifier
There have been some recent updates to the ORCID interface, and SGUL researchers will be pleased to know that SGUL’s data repository hosted in Figshare, now has an integration with ORCID. When you create an item in Figsharea record will be automatically created in your ORCID account (if you have that function enabled – it’s opt-in).
In CRIS, you can confirm your ORCID ID (Menu > My Account > Data source search > Automatic claiming), so that publications will automatically be added to your publication list.
Twitter can be a great place to form a community and develop relationships with other researchers, but it can take a lot of time and effort to build and maintain a profile there. As well as tweeting links to your research, you’ll need to spend time engaging with other researchers to establish your presence and build your relationships, as well as keeping abreast of community norms around things like hashtag usage. You’ll also need to be aware of the possibility of abuse and harassment: SGUL has recently provided some guidance on what to do if you’re the target of trolling. Twitter may not be a low effort medium, but it can allow you to make connections and have conversations that you might otherwise never have had the opportunity for.
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
Publons
The Publons platform allows you to record, gain credit for, and promote your peer reviewing work, work which may have been hidden in the past. Your public profile shows your verified peer reviews as well as publications, and citation metrics, though be aware that the content is based on coverage in Web of Science and may not consider anything not indexed there. The Publons (now Web of Science) Academy offers free peer-review training.
Other platforms
ResearchGate: While sharing and networking sites such as ResearchGate provide services of value to many researchers, ResearchGate is not considered an open access repository, as you need to create an account to login.
Academia.edu, Impact Story, Kudos: These are other sites that can help you share and explore the online impact of your work. These allow you different options of how to sign in (eg Facebook, Twitter) and freemium use is limited to certain features.
The value of open repositories
Bear in mind that commercially or privately owned companies could be taken over at any time1,2 and there is no certainty the content or services will be available on the same terms in future. ResearchGate recently had to take down, at the publishers’ request3, full text articles that researchers had posted which contravened copyright rules.
The sharing platforms that SGUL provides for our researchers, Figshare and SORA, structure the information about the works deposited, making this available in a machine-readable format so these can be more easily found. There are quality assurance and licence information checks before the records are made available.
Speakers at Research Day talked about the acceleration of the work around trials to speed up vaccine development (while maintaining rigour and safety), and about preprinting their research. (For more on preprints, see our blogpost on preprints in the biological, medical and health sciences).
More community driven and not for profit services and digital initiatives such as ORCID, institutional repositories and funder publishing platforms (such as Wellcome Open Research and NIHR Open Research), are helping to open up research and connect the research back to the researchers in a very visible way, allowing for wider scrutiny of the research and who and is communicating it. So it’s worth thinking about how you present yourself and your research online
Any questions? Get in touch with us
- researchdata@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about research data and other types of research output)
- sora@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about the CRIS and making your research publications available via SORA)
- openaccess@sgul.ac.uk (for questions about publishing open access)
The SGUL Communications Team can also help you promote your research and reach a wider audience
We look forward to hearing from you.
Jenni Hughes, Research Publications Assistant
Jennifer Smith, Research Publications Librarian
Liz Stovold, Research Data Support Manager
1 Elsevier Expands Footprint in Scholarly Workflow (2017) Inside Higher Ed https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/03/elsevier-makes-move-institutional-repositories-acquisition-bepress (Accessed 8/12/2021)
2 Wiley Acquires Open Access Innovator Knowledge Unlatched (2021) https://newsroom.wiley.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2021/Wiley-Acquires-Open-Access-Innovator-Knowledge-Unlatched/ (Accessed 8/12/2021)
3 A note on recent content takedowns (2021) https://www.researchgate.net/blog/post/a-note-on-recent-content-takedowns (Accessed 8/12/2021)
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