About the author

This Blog is written by a 22 year old EngD student in Mirco- and Nanomaterials Engineering.
The Blog initially will be following the schedule set by 23 Things course as part of the University of Surrey Researcher Development Programme. 23 Things is a self-directed course, that aims to expose the participant to a range of digital tools that could help in their personal and professional development as a researcher.

Wednesday 15 February 2017

RDP Thing 15 & 16: Surrey Research Insight and Research Impact

"Traditionally, research is written up into articles, which are submitted to a publisher, peer reviewed, and then published in an academic journal. Institutions must pay both to submit the article, and to buy the access to the article (called a journal subscription).
This limits the availability of academic papers to subscribing institutions, journal members, and one-off fee-payers.
Open Access (OA) is about making research papers freely available to anyone who is interested. There are no password or subscription barriers so your research is free to be downloaded and read by a global audience."
So far in my academic career I have contributed and gained co-authorship to 3 published scientific journal articles. One of which I will like here (UK Higher Education students should have access).
Unfortunately as I am no the lead author and as this work was done during my placement year, at the National Physical Laboratory, it is not affiliated with Surrey and I do not have right the to submit to The University of Surrey's OA portal Surrey Research Insight (SRI).
My current EngD project is funded through EPSRC and I will actually be required to have my work available on an open access server. The work is funded by the public therefore it should be open to the public.

I decided to use the Altmetrics Bookmarklet tool to measure the impact that my previously shared publication might have had, as was disappointed to receive the following statistics:


So according to Altmetric, my published work has had absolutely no impact and has actually had no readers, which whilst disappointing is most definitely not true. Looking at Research Gate I can see I have had 20 reads, which whilst isn't a lot, it's better than zero!


Whilst I like many other scientists like the idea of our work being read the world over, I am not a fan of altmetrics and impact scores in general. I personally see them as a distraction from the real purpose of science which is to advance knowledge and not to gain 'clicks'. I do think it is important that science is made accessible and shared to the relevant audience. During my time at NPL though some of the work we did improving the accuracy of ambient NO2 sampling tubes will be read by very few people, but it's low impact scores has absolutely no relation to the importance of the work and he quality of research involved. Also whilst this work will probably have a very low 'impact' in terms of article reads and shares, the actual improvements that were developed will be implemented by councils across the UK, which is surely a massive impact, just not one measured by altmetrics.


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