Kudos announces pilot results and new clients

Articles shared by authors using the pilot-phase Kudos tool saw an average of 19 per cent higher daily downloads than those that didn't, says the company. Kudos is a platform that helps authors and institutions maximise the impact and visibility of their publications.

During its September–December 2013 pilot period, over 5,500 authors registered to use Kudos for explaining and sharing articles. Hundreds of lay summaries, impact statements, short titles and multimedia items were added to aid discoverability and make research easier to interpret. 

'I have found Kudos really useful,' commented one such author, Philip Gale, who is professor of supramolecular chemistry and head of the School of Chemistry at the University of Southampton. 'It not only helps me improve the visibility of my papers, by highlighting them to my social network, but also provides a way of widening the audience for the work by linking a lay summary of the work to the paper.' 

Kudos has also announced new clients, which include the American Society for Microbiology, Emerald Group Publishing, Health Affairs, IOP Publishing, Maney Publishing, OECD, Royal Society Publishing, Thieme Publishers and Wiley.

The Kudos platform is currently undergoing substantial re-development and will be re-launched in April 2014. According to the company, any researcher will be able to register for free, to use the site for explaining and sharing any article, though usage data will only be available for articles added by participating publishers.