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Maximising Access to your Research

KEI beyond the research life cycle

In some cases, KEI activities are concluded once a research project ends. However, making data and findings accessible beyond this time frame is one way of maximising opportunities for engagement and impact to continue beyond this point. The Library is more than a repository; it offers support for maximising the accessibility – and tracking the uptake – of your research outputs throughout and beyond the research life cycle.

Planning Research Stage

Research Data Management is about looking after data so it can be understood and used by you and others. Research Data Management isn’t a stage in, but a constant theme throughout, the research life cycle – from conception, collection, and analysis to publication. We can help you with aspects of management such as:

  • Data availability: covering the searching and availability of research data
  • Research design: including ethical approval for sharing and preservation of data and getting informed consent from research participants.
  • Contextual material: that helps explain what the data are and how they are treated.
  • Safe and secure storage: protecting data from intentional or unintentional damage or disclosure.
  • Responsible sharing: including preservation storage, making the data discoverable, and applying suitable licences for others to reuse the data.

Find out more about the Library's research support.

Post Research Stage

The Publishing Advice Service based in LSE Library can help you at each stage of getting your work out there. Whether you are writing a blog post or a whole book, we can help with:

  • Choosing a journal or publisher for your work
  • Understanding publishing contracts and copyright
  • Non‑traditional publishing routes
  • Managing your publications and profile online

Publishing an article

Open Access is about removing access barriers to research outputs. This can be done through the deposit of an accepted manuscript in our institutional repository LSE Research Online (LSERO), or through publication in journals which are made freely available online.

The LSE Open Access Publications Policy encourages authors to deposit the full text of all research outputs in LSERO. For items that will be submitted for the next HEFCE Research Excellence Framework (REF), authors must deposit in LSERO the full text of the final, peer reviewed, author’s version of journal articles and published conference proceedings no later than three months after acceptance for publication. Authors must also ensure that they comply with the open access publication requirements of any other agencies funding their research.

Adding your research to LSERO ensures greater visibility by linking through to staff profile pages and indexing in Google Scholar, helping ensure that it is accessible to the widest possible audience. You will then be able to track Altmetric Explorer mentions of your research, and see the download figures for each item. Open Access means more readers, more potential collaborators,more citations for your work, and ultimately more recognition.Simply send your manuscript (and any open access queries) to lseresearchonline@lse.ac.uk. 

Maximising impact through use of DOIs

The problem with sharing a web link to somethingis that web links tend not to last. Digital ObjectIdentifiers (DOIs), however, are designed to create persistent and citable reference links. The Library is able to provide DOIs for any research outputs sent to LSE Research Online, including: journal articles where the publisher doesn’t give a DOI, working papers, conference presentations, blog posts, data sets, and even physical objects. Once an object has a DOI it can be quoted, tracked, and satisfies funder requirements for stable web links to research outputs.

How to measure the impact of your research: understanding the metrics

Scholarly metrics (commonly called bibliometrics) provide a means of counting, measuring and comparing quantitatively the academic – and increasingly also the non‑academic – influence of an article, author, or journal. This can be used to support claims of research excellence, significance and impact, as well as to demonstrate collaboration activities. Metrics can help you understand how much, and to some extent how widely, your research is being used. For further information see Research Impact and Bibliometics and for metrics relating more specifically to the degree of influence or effect resulting from this use see KEI Metrics and Indicators.

Researchers are encouraged to make sure that they’re using responsible Metrics.As well as being robust and transparent, responsible metrics are likely to be discipline‑specific and to vary over time. It is therefore important that they are used in context, taking into account the discipline and timeframe under consideration. It is increasingly recognised that bibliometrics should be used in combination with other qualitative measures when being used to assess quality as expressed in the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics.

 

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