In December, Kudos announced a record-breaking month, adding 13 new publishers to its customer roster. It included large societies such as the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, established publishers such as SAGE, which, following a pilot with a set of journals added all 900+ of its journals to the service, and an innovative self-publishing startup, GlassTree Academic Publishing, the scholarly publishing division of consumer self-publishing company Lulu.
Outsell first wrote about Kudos in its inaugural 12 months (See Insights, January 5, 2014, And the Band Played On … Startup Metrics Provider Kudos Continues the March Toward Measuring Value in Scientific Content), characterizing it as a metrics provider. In fact, the company is so much more. December’s announcement follows a year of notable growth for Kudos, now claiming 70,000 users in over 250 countries, close to 60 publisher partners, and awards such as the ALPSP Award of Innovation in Publishing. A commissioned study will analyze data gathered to date, but preliminary internal analysis indicates a 54% increase in article downloads when authors use Kudos to explain them, and a 64% increase when they share. Customer Emerald Group’s own analysis found article downloads tripled when authors used Kudos.
The company’s vision for the future is to move from a standalone platform to seamless integration into researcher workflows, transcending the boundaries of the publishing workflow to reflect more broadly the reputation needs of researchers throughout their careers. The focus is on the who, what, how, when, and where of reputational factors, and what information could be more intelligently joined to guide researchers as they seek to establish themselves and grow in their chosen fields.
Kudos’ current services map communications to metrics to help users understand which efforts to promote their work actually increase readership. The company plans to take a similar approach to helping them know, for example, which events to attend or which skills training to seek out, by mapping those activities to growth in a wide range of reputational factors – a sort of impact factor for events and training. Data around which large social networking platforms (SNPs) such as Mendeley or ResearchGate generate the most interest in a researcher’s work is also on the drawing board. Kudos currently supports legitimate sharing on SNPs through providing researchers with coded links to publication profile pages on the Kudos platform, which in turn links directly to publisher sites. Users can then track subsequent impact utilizing the Kudos dashboard. Actionable insights will come through analysis of this information, including focusing on actions and platforms that effectively generate impact that matters to them.
In pilot phase are services for societies, funders, and industry, allowing them a simple way to surface, amplify, respond to, and learn from authors’ communications about their work. A freemium aspect will come in the future, possibly including direct-to-author services provided by either Kudos or partners such as Research Media and Research Square. These paid-for outreach services would help authors, for example, produce a video abstract or infographic, or get professional help with explaining research in non-technical language. Other freemium services might include more detailed information about performance, providing benchmarking and clear guidance for promoting and disseminating research.
Implications:
Kudos continues to grow in large part because of customers sharing news of their successes, spreading the word about the efficacy of the company’s offerings. The most compelling factor, however, aligns with Victor Hugo’s claim, “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come,” and the time has come for Kudos as publishers look to support authors while leveraging their networks and knowledge in growing visibility and reach of publications. The bottom line is that the company provides a cost-effective way to motivate, monitor, and measure the effect of communications around research, uniquely positioned as an independent shared service in which all publishers can participate, and therefore benefit from aggregate insight beyond that generated from their own data silo.
The success of Kudos speaks to the opportunity in the marketplace for innovation, particularly in author services, an activity publishers are choosing to exploit through partnerships rather than internal innovation. While partnering is a way to test the market with minimal risk, it also means that startups will reap most of the benefits if initiatives such as author profile augmentation succeed – which, looking at the Kudos trajectory, it clearly is doing. Those publishers, such as Emerald and SAGE, who are actively working with companies like Kudos to gain valuable insights into how researchers are working and succeeding, will benefit most through an understanding of what is happening in today’s market.
Kudos’ story also highlights several trends from Outsell’s Information Industry Outlook 2016 report: helping senior-level decision-makers understand how millennials manage reputation, providing guidance to millennials and others at early-career stage with recommendations based on prescriptive analytics, and effectively connecting and forming networks with niche and hyper-niche companies.
