Making your science work for society

September 29, 2017 *

Recently, we announced new features enabling authors to add non-specialist summaries to their articles indexed on ScienceOpen. We believe that having authors add these to their articles helps to make them more accessible to a wider audience, increase their reach. It makes a clear statement that they care about the societal impact of their research.

Value added!

Well, clearly you are all seeing the value in these features too! We’ve already had over 170 great authors writing non-specialist summaries since making the announcement. By integrating this into our research engine, we are seeing those articles gaining a huge boost in popularity! These authors have also added extra keywords and thumbnails to their articles to make them more visible and discoverable on ScienceOpen.

Great author summary of important groundwater research in Indonesia (Source)

Making an impact in the open

We are extremely happy to see authors keen to make their work more accessible. The great thing about adding these summaries is that they are valuable whether or not the articles are published Open Access.

Some of our favourites so far are:

How to add your own article summaries

ScienceOpen already has 32 million records in its database. Here are a few simple steps for you to find your articles, and add your own personalised summaries:

Integrate your ORCID profile
Refresh your ScienceOpen account from ORCID (takes a few minutes some times..)
Click on your publications list
Add summaries to them!
You can also add keywords and article thumbnails at this point

This really is a great way to engage non-specialists with your research, and is becoming more important than ever in the modern research environment. We have to make the interface between academia and the public more permeable and transparent, and this is just one way to do so.

It’s simple, efficient, and can make a big difference. If you have any questions, please contact us!