Support for research staff and students

After all your efforts to get your research published you'll want to make sure that it reaches the widest audience possible. 

The tips below should help you to share and promote your research to maximise readership, attention to your research and possibly boost future citations.

Congratulations, your output has been accepted for publication! 

There is one very important thing to do now to make sure that you comply with university, funder and REF policies on Open Access. 

• Deposit the author-accepted manuscript in the University of Reading's institutional repository, CentAUR, as soon as possible after acceptance. 

The CentAUR team will make sure that you have sent the correct version of your output and will check the publisher's policies on open access. It may be that your output may not be available to download from the repository for up to two years depending on the publisher's embargo. However, by making sure that the output is in the repository, you will fulfill your funder's policies on open access and your output should comply with the open access requirements for submissions to the next Research Excellence Framework exercise (REF 2021). 

CentAUR is not just a compliance tool for authors. Each month, thousands of readers from across the world access the content in CentAUR and download the manuscripts. This can be a vital way for researchers without access to a well-resourced library to access the latest research. The access and download statistics for CentAUR are posted on the Open Research at Reading Blog each month. 

There are lots of ways to promote your research and make sure that it reaches a larger audience.

Promotion tips

• Link your works in CentAUR to your University staff webpage to increase visibility.
• Use social media to drive traffic to your publications. Post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. 
  Make sure that you use the DOI of your publication in your post (or a shortened version created via bitly.com, ow.ly or tinyurl.com). This will direct readers to your publication easily and will also let tools like Altmetric and Plum Analytics keep track of any attention. 
• Blog about your research to encourage ongoing discussion, record a podcast, make a video, or design an infographic.
• Find links with current news stories – contact the University Press Office on pressoffice@reading.ac.uk as soon as a news story emerges.
• Edit relevant Wikipedia pages, inserting text and references to your research.
• Promote associated outputs such as research data or software code. Cite them by DOI or other unique identifiers.
• Organise a conference for major outputs – contact the University Events Team on events@reading.ac.uk
• Add the details of your latest publication to your email signature
• If you are given an sharing link by a publisher (for example Share Links from Elsevier, SharedIt from Springer Nature), make sure that you use it to let others in your subject area access your research. 
• Investigate tools such as Kudos that help authors to share their research by writing an accessible summary of their research to help you reach a wider audience. 

Sharing your work can make sure that as many people as possible see and read your outputs

• Upload permitted versions to Academia.edu, ResearchGate or Mendeley – and tag with keywords.
• Send PDFs of your article to your peer network (if allowed by your publisher) – don’t assume they will see it in a journal.
• Use shareable links provided by the publisher to disseminate your paper to your peers.
• Include links to your latest publications in your email signature.

Share your research legally

Most publishers have details on how you can share your work on their websites. - see below for some useful links to publisher sites.
There's also a useful tool, howcanishareit that will tell you what permissions you have to share an article based on the doi.