Where is research going - a Kudos report

I’ve finally gotten around to looking at the report that Kudos developed earlier this year looking into where research outputs go to, and where they get consumed, after they have been published.

You get grab a copy of the report here How to build a global, engaged audience for your research..

The report is based on a survey of 10k researchers, supported with interviews and desk research.

It’s a short read (19 pages), so go ahead and grab the report and have a look.

Some key take-aways for me are the following:

• only 5% of academics thought that they didn’t need to demonstrate the broader impact of their work. OK, that’s not surprising, but I would love to find out who those people are. More surprising is the claim that HSS researchers feel that this is less important to them than STM researchers. They claim significantly so. That’s just puzzling to me, and I could make some guesses as to why, but I’m not going to venture a guess now.
• Institutions are struggling to keep up with the growing level of support that researchers require around communications, engagement and impact, and there is a big gap in the market here.
• About 40% of funders require an impact plan. Just under 30% require data to be open.
• Slide 15 is the kicker. Researchers need lots of support in doing things like developing websites to communicate their work, and yet feel that they don’t get this support. There is money from funders to support some of this work.

The key implication from this report is that there might be a market opportunity in helping researchers create other kinds of published online outputs for their work, that are not just research articles. That’s a huge field of product opportunity to be playing in, and how one decides to try top into it is very open ended.

Perhaps APC’s could cross fund a micro-website for each research publication, that used summarisation technology to create a skeleton outline for how to describe the broader impact that the work has?