Monday 31 October 2022

Sharing Your Research

 Source: https://libguides.napier.ac.uk/share/waystoshare

Sharing Your Research

Considerations

Online Presence

Your “digital footprint”  is everything you've done online, not just your personal information. The things you've said, the things you've tagged or liked or shared and what other people have said about you. Remember that you are not only representing yourself, you are also representing the university. If you already have personal accounts with social networking tools are you happy to use these when sharing your research or do you want to set up "professional" accounts? If you are happy to use your personal accounts, we do recommend that you spend some time tidying up your profile and look at your privacy settings - do you really want new research contacts to see the Facebook photos your friends have uploaded of you or for your account to bombard them with game invites etc? 

Saving time / online efficiency

If you think you might use several types of social media you should think about using a social media management tool such as Hootsuite. This will help you to automatically share a blog post or a tweet or an Instagram back through your other social media outlets. There are other social media management tools available, but Hootsuite is user friendly and free for individuals.

Most social media platforms either have in built time saving tools or apps you can use to help you. Did you know that you can schedule tweets or blogs to appear at chosen times, so you can build up a quick reserve of items to automatically post at times when you know you will be busy (marking exams, on holiday etc). Twitter has an advanced search which can help you to track down people & conversations. You can also create specific lists within Twitter so you can easily see what is being said on a particular topic.

Copyright

If you are going to share completed research, you must think about copyright. Before you upload a copy of a published paper to your blog, or a platform such as Academia.edu make sure you have the legal right to do so. If you have published in a journal, you must check the permissions from the publisher using the Sherpa Romeo database and only upload permitted versions of a publication (you may have written a paper, but the copyright may be held by the publisher, not you). Similarly, if your research has been funded by an organisation or a company, find out what they are happy for you to share publicly. Check the Library’s copyright pages for more information. 

Compliance

Be sure to familiarise yourself with Edinburgh Napier University policies on Social Media use. Including the Social Media Usage Policy, Social media best practice guidelines, and help from Marketing and Communications.

Resources

Blogging about your research is increasingly seen as standard practice. If you haven’t done it before it can seem a daunting task. Look at the blogs of other researchers you know (and ask them for tips), think about what works and just as importantly what doesn’t work.

Some people blog about their research and their daily life intertwined, some chose a more formal, structured style. To write something interesting and successful you need to be comfortable doing it. If you love photography, use photos in your blog; if you are a visual learner then use infographs; if you don’t like writing or are nervous, start off with short blog posts. It’s worth saying again, you need to think about the audience you want to read your blog. If you want to engage with companies then maybe a photo of your dog reading your research paper isn’t the right tone, but for a group of school children it might be a fun way to engage them. 

Wordpress logo.WordPress is a universally popular platform for creating blogs. It’s free and fairly simple to use, enabling a good range of customisation. It also works well with many other platforms, making linking and sharing easy.

The Coversation logo.

The Conversation is a collaboration between journalists and academics, committed to evidence based articles. It aims to publish news and commentary style articles that are free to read and republish. A particularly good tool for early career researchers to investigate. 

Hypotheses logo.Hypotheses is a free publication platform for scholarly blogs open to the academic community in all disciplines of the arts, humanities and social sciences. Run by Centre for Open Electronic Publishing (Cléo, France) users must first submit a registration before taking part.

HASTAC logo.​HASTAC (The Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) is an interdisciplinary community of humanists, artists, social scientists, scientists, and technologists that combines blogging, networking, collaborative research, and teaching.

ScienceBlogs is the largest online community dedicated to science and is a digital science salon featuring the leading bloggers from a wide array of scientific disciplines.

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