Long-Term Impact Requires Archiving Research Communication

In the past research collaborations and project outputs meant reports, journal papers and conference presentations. The internet has given academics the ability to store data, code and other information materials. Platforms such as Github, Figshare and Zenodo have gone a long way to making this research FAIR, but what about artefacts that assist the dissemination of these outputs?

Videos, podcasts, infographics, visualisations, blog posts and other creative activities have become a commonplace in knowledge mobilisation, but where and how they are hosted is often an afterthought. What happens to these outputs that bring work to wider audiences and can involve collaborative partners and members of the public? The answer is varied, often impractical and frequently involves work being scattered across personal websites, rather than the creation of a cohesive archive that tells a wider story about research.

A key challenge is when projects come to an end and whether they can be passed like a baton to future collaborations as bids are won and lost. When this doesn’t happen, formal reports, data and journal papers are usually accessible via funder or journal websites. Everything else can be left by the wayside. This might not seem like an issue for most research projects that create few communication outputs. However, for those that do, especially when these outputs are created with external partners and agencies it can result in a lot of wasted effort. Work that communicates and translates research can have significant afterlives, signposting and highlighting key aspects of studies that otherwise remain silent outside of academia.

Finding the right host

Research teams should therefore think carefully from the outset about platforms to host this content and what happens to it in the future. For larger more complex projects with research communications funding, thinking about collections and campaigns is a useful way to frame your archiving strategy.

Not everything needs archiving, but if you have spent £6,000 on a research video, why host it on a personal YouTube channel with no subscribers if there are alternatives? If you have gone to the effort of commissioning a bespoke animation about your project, it might not be as laborious as writing a peer reviewed paper, but it will potentially cost more to publish, why let it disappear once the project has finished? Librarians and information professionals give a lot of thought as to where preprints, data and journal papers are archived, shouldn’t the same consideration be given to high value, long lasting, potentially impactful communication activities?

The alternatives are there. It is easy to set up a YouTube channel or Spotify playlist via a project’s generic email address. Tying a personal email address to a shared resource such as a project’s social media account opens up all kinds of problems. What happens if this person falls ill or as all too often happens finds a better academic job somewhere else? In some cases an institution or funder may host the videos and create a playlist on their own video channel, this can provide greater longevity that is hard to obtain through individual efforts.

This is not always possible with collaborative and commissioned work, or if your communications team is protective of their channels, but it should be investigated. Finding the correct host mitigates some of these challenges and also ensures your work is on a platform that actually has an audience. Many reading this post will have been approached by various agencies offering to create a polished magazine article or video about their work. The quality of these outputs can be very good, but again there is little point paying for such services if the finished product is hidden on the creator’s platform, unstructured and undiscoverable.

Developing a strategy

These are issues we have given much thought to as part of a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funded project to help mobilize public health research with local authorities. KNOW-PH (Knowledge for Public Health) aims to be as transparent as possible over the project lifetime. As part of this program of work we aim to produce a range of content, from podcasts and videos, to protocols, infographics and blogs.

It was important for us to limit the amount of places where outputs were hosted and who owned them. Ultimately having an archive was important to us to ensure some degree of longevity as platforms remove older content or cease to exist entirely. For example an animated video relating to the project is hosted on YouTube for discoverability and reach, but also Figshare, for sharing and archiving purposes. Whereas, podcasts are hosted on Spotify also archived on Figshare. All of these hosting platforms provide the ability to embed outputs externally, whilst Figshare gives the content a DOI and formatted citation. Blog articles, such as this one, exist here first and foremost, because this is a key readership for the topic and is licensed accordingly to allow it to be reposted elsewhere, such as the project website and LinkedIn Page. Like the others they are also archived on Figshare for posterity. As in the table below, we found it useful to think in terms of three criteria for selecting a host: location, owner, platform.

Our activities are archived on Figshare and Google Drive, both of which are owned by a generic KNOW-PH NIHR-hosted email address. This has benefits, firstly it ensures that anything created as a result of this work can be cited, shared and measured, but also that the funder can access it all in one place. It also means that if the project is renewed, that the materials can still be accessed by the current team or the next one.

Mobilizing knowledge is not just about ensuring evidence reaches those who can use it, but also making the process easy. This means making knowledge available in the long term, and that is helped by making everything you archive including communication and engagement activities open and accessible.

KNOW-PH (Knowledge for Public Health) is funded by the NIHR award NIHR159057.