We said we were going to have big changes live by Sept 15th when early adopters’ free trials expire. Well here’s our first one: Impactstory’s now a great place to freely share your articles, slides, videos, and more–and get viewership stats to track impacts even better.
Share everything
Before, product pages focused just on the metrics for your research products. Those metrics are still there, but now the focus is on the product itself. Yep, that’s right: people can now view and read your work right on Impactstory. So we’re not just a place to share the impact of your work, we’re also a place to share your actual research.
It’s super easy to upload your preprints to Impactstory (and you should!). But it gets even better–for most OA publications, we automatically embed the PDF for you. It’s handy, and it’s a also great example of the kind of interoperability OA makes possible.
But as y’all know, at Impactstory we’re passionate about supporting scholarly products beyond articles. So we’re also automatically embedding a slew of other tasty product types. GitHub repo? We’ve got your README file embedded. Figshare image? Yup, that’s on your profile now too. You want to view videos from Vimeo and YouTube, and slides from Slideshare, right on your Impactstory page? Done.
Discover how many people are viewing your research
We’re also rolling out viewership stats for your Impactstory product page. So not only do you learn when folks are citing, discussing, and saving your work–you learn when they’re reading it, too. Over time we’ll likely add viewership maps and other ways to dig into this data even more.
Why you should upload your work to Impactstory
Sharing your work directly on Impactstory has lots of advantages. It brings all your product types together in one place, under your brand as a researcher, not under the brand of a journal or institution. It also makes the case for your research’s value better than metrics alone–it helps you tell a fuller impact story.
Uploading your work is also a great quick way to just get your work out there. In that regard it’s kind of like what Academia.edu and ResearchGate offer–except we don’t make potential readers create an account to access your work. It’s open. We don’t yet have comprehensive preservation strategy (persistent IDs, CLOCKSS, etc), but we’ll be listening to see if there’s demand for that.
As you may notice, we are super excited about this feature. We’re going to be working hard to get the word out about it to our users, and we’re counting on all or your help on that. And of course as always we’d also love your feedback, particularly on bugs; a feature this big will certainly need a few as users to kick the tires.
And now we’re transitioning to working our next big set of features…can’t wait to launch those over the next two weeks!