Authors' guidelines on publishers' websites

I recently started to look at publishers' guides to authors, and I noticed which profile sites they recommend authors to use in the promotion of their work. There is quite a lot of variety amongst the publishers I visited today:

The Taylor and Francis website has a neat piece of advice on how authors might promote their work: http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/beyondpublication/promotearticle.asp Taylor and Francis advise the use of LinkedIn and academic social networking sites, mentioning MyNetResearch and Academici as examples… they wouldn’t have been my first choices as I didn't even cover them in my recent piece on profile sites (http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/libresearch/entry/warwick_people_on/). However, they could be worth exploring.

Springer’s Author pages (http://www.springer.com/authors) offer advice on using online tools and social media as well. They mention Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and ResearchGate, Twitter and Wikipedia.

Sage’s section on “Promote your article” for authors (http://www.sagepub.com/journalgateway/promote.htm) lists YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr and other Sage provided channels that authors can use. Their section on “Help readers find your article” also offers valuable advice on Search Engine Optimisation: http://www.sagepub.com/journalgateway/findArticle.htm

OUP's journal authors' "Social Media Author Guidelines" (http://www.oxfordjournals.org/for_authors/socialmedia.html) are very comprehensive, covering blogs, twitter, facebook and youtube, and linking to the OUP channels on such sites in a similar way to Sage. They also list LinkedIn, Goodreads, flickr, tumblr and Quora.

Emerald’s “How to Guides” for authors include some valuable advice on disseminating your work: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/authors/guides/promote/disseminate.htm?part=1 but it is their advice on “drawing attention to your book” which covers the use of social media best, in my view.

None of these author guidelines mention repository deposit, however!

As an aside: I did also look for Elsevier and Wiley's guides but couldn't find comparable content easily: I recall Elsevier having published a very good guide to getting published, as a pdf file, but my link was broken.

With all this variety and plethora of strategies, then researchers could spend their entire time promoting their work. However, Brian Kelly's recent blog post on the value of inbound linking to enhancing access to papers gives a practical example of how some of these sites can be used in a strategic way. The difference between using these strategies to promote a repository version of a paper and the published version of a paper could be dependent on whether you're going to get article level metrics to tell you which of your activities are having the desired effect. Does your publisher or your repository give you such metrics?

Jenny Delasalle : 07 Mar 2012 19:17 |  Tags: Getting Published Researcher Profiles Researchers |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem