Communicate your research
Social media
With the rise of the open access movement and widespread use of social media in academia, many researchers now choose to share and promote their research ideas, preliminary findings, and final research outputs via social media. Popular channels include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, The Conversation, LinkedIn, Mendeley, and blogging.
As a Deakin Researcher, in addition to the common precautions, you need to follow the University's media and social media policies when communicating your research online. The University's Marketing Division provides information and support on using social media at Deakin
Conferences
Conference presentations and posters are an important part of scholarly communication, especially for sharing new research ideas and preliminary findings. Many conferences now provide free access to their presentations and posters via their websites (and some will also publish conference proceedings). As such, presenting at a high impact conference can help raise the visibility of your research.
In addition, presenting at a high-impact conference will provide you a great opportunity to meet key researchers in your field, broaden your research networks, find potential collaborators, and more. Thus, selecting the appropriate conference is crucial.
For more information on how to evaluate the quality of a conference, please see the Evaluate Quality and Conferences: The how-to-choose guide tabs of this guide.
OA repositories
Another effective way of disseminating your research is depositing a copy of your publications into an open access (OA) repository. There are two broad types of OA repositories - institutional repository and subject repository. Both types store and provide access to research of various content types and formats (i.e. scholarly journal articles, theses, reports, videos, images, and other creative works).
Deakin Research Online (DRO) is Deakin's institutional repository. It stores, manages, indexes, preserves and showcases research outputs produced by Deakin researchers, staff, and HDR candidates; making them discoverable throughout the world. DRO includes a wide range of research outputs in published and post-print format; many are freely available for download.
The benefits of showcasing your research in DRO include (but not limited to):
- Raising the visibility of your research outputs around the world by virtue of metadata harvesting and other indexing services like Google Scholar. Higher visibility will increase citations and help you connect with other researchers throughout the world.
- Making Grey literature (e.g., theses and conference papers) more discoverable online
- Providing a direct link to all of your research outputs and making them available in one place.
- Meeting University research reporting requirements such as HERDC
- Complying with funders (e.g., ARC & NHMRC) and University open access policies.
For more information on disseminating your research via OA repositories, please Contact your librarian.