You are encouraged to submit your research to CCCU Research Space Repository.

UKRI has mandated that all articles and conference proceedings published with an ISSN must be deposited in a repository within 3 months of acceptance publication for consideration in the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Making your articles open access facilitates prompt and widespread dissemination of your research, and can result in increased citations as well as enhancing your research profile by making your research publications available in one place.

Most conventional publishers give standing permission for author-initiated green open access (i.e. publishing in a repository) and others will give permission on request.

Publishing in open access journals can boost the visibility, dissemination, use and impact of your work. Studies have shown that open access content attracts more attention than other content, leading to increased citations. Research can be disseminated more rapidly and widely, which can lead to greater public engagement.

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher, and helps to ensure that you get credit for your work. Once you have registered, you can add your article information to your ORCID profile. Find out more on the ORCID webpages.

Academia.edu social networking platform that can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow research in a particular field. It has 71 million registered users (October 2022) and over 40 million uploaded texts. Upload and tag your papers with keywords to make them searchable. Use the Analytics function to monitor who has read your research.

In addition to facilitating saved searches and setting alerts, creating a Google Scholar profile will allow you to track citations to your publications and receive alerts, and have them appear in Google Scholar search results for your name. (Select “My Citations”).

Mendeley is a reference management and academic social networking tool. Add a list of your publications and affiliations to your profile and find other researchers to connect and collaborate with.

ResearchGate is a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, with over 17 million users (October 2022).

Use your LinkedIn profile to display your experience and expertise and add new papers to the Publications section. Upload conference presentations about your research to SlideShare and start building your followers around the content you have already created.

Actively build-up a Twitter profile to Tweet about your research, with updates on your research progress as well as adding links to final publications (if made available online). Add relevant hashtags and tag co-authors or colleagues who could share your work. Follow key figures in your field, who may reply/like/retweet your posts and help to disseminate your work more widely.

Video content is increasingly popular for sharing information and ideas. You could create a short YouTube video summarising the scope and key findings of your paper, or provide further background on your research and methods.

Blogs can be useful tools to explain or expand on your research for a more general audience. To help people find your posts, think about the words or phrases your readers would search for to find content related to your topic. Incorporate these keywords into your post and add them as categories and tags. Write compelling titles/headlines to drive people to read your post.

Some of the above research-sharing platforms include their own blogging functions and some CCCU departments have their own blogs.

Other popular blogging platforms include WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr.

Find places where people are already discussing topics similar to your own and join in the conversation. For example, JISCmail  has many discussion lists on different topics for a wide range of education and research communities.

If you want to issue a press release about your research, or promote it through the media, then contact CCCU's Marketing and Communications department who can advise on how to maximise impact.

Kudos

Kudos is an online dissemination toolkit. It works in three steps:

1. Researchers create a Kudos publication page by filling in a template to explain their research, why it is important, and to link related resources to their publication to show the broader context.
2. The researcher can share this page via social media, and on their blog or website.
3. Kudos provides metrics to measure the impact of using it – looking at downloads, citations and altmetrics.

Buffer

Buffer is a social media management platform. It allows people to manage all their social media accounts in one place, schedule posts and get analytics for their accounts. It gives users a complete overview of how all of their social media accounts are performing, which is useful for researchers using a variety of dissemination channels.

Don’t treat publicising as a one-off event

Once your article has been published don’t just post about it once, but find creative ways to put your research in front of your audience often. You could post about small portions of your research that are interesting on their own; conclusions of your research that are currently timely or in the news; congratulations to the authors that worked on the research with you; or links to other research that is connected to your own.

Present a consistent digital identity

For example, you might want to use the same photo across your profile pages, blog homepage and social media accounts, so that people who might be interested in your research can instantly identify and verify you.

Maintain connections between platforms

Share your newest blog posts on social media, or including a link to your blog or website in your Twitter bio and faculty page.

Prioritise communication channels

If you do not have time to engage with all channels then prioritise based on relevance and the potential to reach your key audiences. Or try out several methods/tools and monitor to see which has the most impact.

Make research easily accessible

Consider writing a plain English summary of your work, focused on making it more accessible to a wider audience. This will provide a good introduction to your research and encourage more people to read your paper.

Select keywords carefully

Keywords and abstracts play a vital role in researchers retrieving an article. Identify several synonyms and use terms that you used in conducting your own literature review then add these as keywords/tags/indexing terms/hashtags etc. wherever you refer to your research.

Use visual content

Visual content is more appealing to audiences because it conveys information more quickly and often more effectively than text alone and helps to grab attention. You could include slides from lectures you have given on the topic; figures from your research; videos describing your research.

Link to your research from your email signature and university profiles

This will ensure that your contacts are kept up to date with your latest research.

Liaise with your publishers

Your journal publisher can often work with you to disseminate your work more widely and help with promotion, e.g. Taylor and Francis advice on creating video abstracts.