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Andy Tattersall

Liz Such

Joe Langley

Fiona Marshall

January 27th, 2025

The perfect host – Why archiving research communication outputs is key to long term impact

1 comment | 3 shares

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Andy Tattersall

Liz Such

Joe Langley

Fiona Marshall

January 27th, 2025

The perfect host – Why archiving research communication outputs is key to long term impact

1 comment | 3 shares

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

In recent years there has been an increased focus on how research papers and supplemental data can be preserved openly. Andy Tattersall, Liz Such, Joe Langley and Fiona Marshall argue equal attention should also be paid to curating communication outputs aimed at engaging non-academic audiences.


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.

What happens to these outputs that bring work to wider audiences and can involve collaborative partners and members of the public?

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 £6000 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?

Not everything needs archiving, but if you have spent £6000 on a research video, why host it on a personal YouTube channel with no subscribers if there are alternatives?

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 mobilise 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 programme of work we aim to produce a range of content, from podcasts and videos, to protocols, infographics and blogs.

NameOutputLocationOwnerAccess
8 Ways to speed up coproductionInfographicFigshare
Shared Google Drive
KNOW-PH
NIHR
NIHR owned email address (collaborators have access)
KNOW-PH Branding materialsAnimation and graphic filesShared Google DriveKNOW-PH
NIHR
NIHR owned email address (collaborators have access)
How can research funders make the most of the knowledge they already have?
(Published on the LSE Impact Blog)
BlogpostBlog
Figshare
Shared Google Drive
KNOW-PH
NIHR
NIHR owned email address (collaborators have access

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.

Mobilising 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.


The content generated on this blog is for information purposes only. This Article gives the views and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impact of Social Science blog (the blog), nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

KNOW-PH is funded by the NIHR award NIHR159057.

Image Credit: Jeremy Walter on Shutterstock


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About the author

Andy Tattersall

Andy Tattersall is an Information Specialist at The School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) and writes, teaches and gives talks about digital academia, technology, scholarly communications, open research, web and information science, apps, altmetrics, and social media. In particular, their applications for research, teaching, learning, knowledge management and collaboration. Andy received a Senate Award from The University of Sheffield for his pioneering work on MOOCs in 2013 and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is also Chair for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals – Multi Media and Information Technology Committee. Andy was listed as one of Jisc’s Top Ten Social Media Superstars for 2017 in Higher Education. He has edited a book on altmetrics for Facet Publishing which is aimed at researchers and librarians. He tweets @Andy_Tattersall and his ORCID ID is 0000-0002-2842-9576.

Liz Such

Liz Such is the overall lead for KNOW-PH and works on the rapid response arm of the programme. Liz has a background in public health, social policy and knowledge mobilisation. She has worked for universities and for the UK government in social research and has a long history of working on topics relating to social inequalities.

Joe Langley

Joe Langley leads the co-production work and the use of various creative approaches for KNOW-PH. He has a background in design engineering and knowledge mobilisation and has worked at Sheffield Hallam University since 2007. A large part of his role explores the use of creative methods and design practices in co-production to help mobilise evidence into practice and policy. 

Fiona Marshall

Fiona Marshall has immersed herself in health and social care research, specialising in qualitative approaches. Fiona's mission is to bridge the perspectives of users and providers, fostering trust and collaborative knowledge exchange. Fiona has focused on dissecting large organisations' designs and delivery systems to optimize services, exploring areas like ageing, neurological rehabilitation, disability theory, rural care, and therapies, including virtual reality and animal-assisted interventions.

Posted In: Academic communication | Featured | Open Research | Research funding

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