Credit where credit is due: The startups, products and organizations giving academics credit for more of their work

By Katie Metzler, Associate VP of Product Innovation, SAGE Publishing

It’s all about incentives. The current academic ecosystem incentivises publication in high impact factor journals and grant capture above all else, but there is more to being an academic than producing journal articles and winning grants. Luckily there are an increasing number of initiatives that are helping academics get credit for more of the work they do and increase their broader impact. This post rounds up some of the most interesting efforts.

Getting credit for early stage research

Morressier: This Berlin-based start-up has built beautiful conference software and aims to become THE home for early stage research. Their platform hosts conference posters, presentations, and abstracts, along with datasets, videos, and negative results, opening up the entire scientific process from idea to creation. Early stage research artifacts can be given DOIs allowing them to be discovered, cited and shared using their platform, meaning researchers can get credit for all their work building up to the journal article.

Getting credit for your methodology section

SAGE Research Methods Cases: We publish peer-reviewed case studies on how researchers have carried out their research, including what went wrong. Case studies have ISBNs and DOIs and we accept submissions from PhD students and early career academics. You can add your published SAGE Research Methods Case to your CV as an example of a peer-reviewed and citable publication. 

Right now we are commissioning SAGE Research Methods Cases in Health and Medicine. Submission guidelines can be found here.

Getting credit for teaching materials

GitHub & Zenodo: SAGE Ocean has been working with a group of UK academics to tackle the thorny challenge of incentives for sharing and reuse of teaching materials, in this case in the field of Computational Social Science. Assigning DOIs through Zenodo which integrates with GitHub could help researchers to get credit for the teaching materials they share. 

Check out our collection of CSS teaching materials on GitHub and read more about this project on the SAGE Ocean blog.

Getting credit for peer review

Publons: Publons was first built as a place to help researchers get recognition for their often hidden peer review contributions. To do this they partnered with academic publishers to help them give their peer reviewers the recognition they deserve. Publons was acquired in 2017 by Clarivate Analytics and has moved towards a broader mission of helping researchers to track their impact.

For more on credit for peer review, see this Scholarly Kitchen post. To read more about social science impact, check out our recent white paper.

PLOS’s Published Peer Review Option: PLOS has recently launched a published peer review option because they believe that “publishing peer review history is a means of enriching the scientific record by giving context to evaluation and publication decisions.” PLOS also hopes this is “a first step toward elevating peer reviews to scholarly outputs in their own right that reviewers can take credit for.”

Getting credit for research software

Software Sustainability Institute: The SSI does incredible work helping people who build software for research within a university, Research Software Engineers, to get credit for their work and to ensure they have meaningful career paths within the university. Given how much research now relies on software (7 out of 10 say their work would be impossible without it), the SSI’s work around sustainability feels ever more important.

If you’re interested in this, also check out Force11’s work in this area.

Getting credit for your code

Code Ocean: New kid on the block Code Ocean has made waves (sorry couldn’t resist) with their slick cloud-based platform designed to lower the barriers for researchers to follow best practices of reproducibility. With Code Ocean you can “share code and data alongside published articles to have workflows, algorithms, or analyses indexed by search engines, citable via DOI, and featured right next to the article.”

Getting credit for your research data 

Dataverse: Dataverse, which has been developed at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), is an open source application to “share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. Researchers, journals, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive academic credit and web visibility. By increasing research data's visibility with Dataverse, researchers can get recognition and proper academic credit for their scholarly work through a data citation. These citations also help ensure that when research data is published, funder and publisher requirements are met, and data is reused by other scholars, replicated for verification, and tracked to measure usage and impact over time, which can help fund future research.”

About

Katie Metzler is Associate VP of Product Innovation and strategic lead for the SAGE Research Methods product portfolio, which includes Cases, Datasets and Video. She leads the SAGE Ocean initiative which aims to equip every social scientist with the skills and tools they need to do the social science research of the future. As part of this initiative, she led the development of SAGE Campus, a suite of online courses teaching research methods and data science skills to social scientists. She is also responsible for the product management function supporting SAGE’s digital products for the library market, including SAGE Video, Data Planet, SAGE Stats, SAGE Knowledge, CQ Researcher and Business Cases.  

Katie began her publishing career at McGraw-Hill Education and joined SAGE Publishing in 2006 as an Editorial Assistant. She spent eight years in commissioning roles within SAGE’s textbook publishing team before moving into product innovation. Follow Katie on Twitter @KMetzlerSAGE or contact the SAGE Ocean team.