Researcher's guide to responsible and open science

Have you considered the visibility and discoverability of your research?

• Has your name changed or has your work ever been associated with a wrong person with the same name?
• Do search engines and those looking for experts find you?
• Can you find your information in the University's personnel search and on the website?
• Do you write for a wide audience and would like to highlight the societal impact of your work?

You can promote your visibility and the discoverability of your publications

Here are some things you can do to influence how you appear as a researcher in the academic community and in society in general. With these factors, you can influence how your publications, data, and other research-related activities are discovered. You can adopt the methods that feel right for you.

1. Make sure that your information and researcher profile are up to date.

• Consistently use the same spelling and format for your name in your publications.
• Add your organisation as an affiliation when your publication is based on research or expert work carried out there. Mark your affiliation in your publications clearly. Use the format: (your name), University, Faculty, City, Country. For example:
  • University: Teija Tutkija, Tampere University, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere, Finland.
  • University of Applied Sciences: Teija Tutkija, Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Applied Research Center, Tampere, Finland.
  • You can check the official names on the page: Names and abbreviations in Tampere Universities community (intra).
• Create a researcher identifier for yourself, e.g. ORCID. Researcher identifiers aim to solve problems related to name changes, researchers with the same name, or different spellings of names.
• The research information system TUNICRIS gathers information on all research conducted at the University and the outputs related to this research. In addition to scientific publications, also save other publications, academic activities, interviews, and awards in the system.
• Maintain your personal profile page on the intranet, update your professional information, add a link to your own TUNICRIS publication list, and make your profile public. This will improve your search engine visibility and you can also be found when searching the University's website.
• Check your own publications in international databases (e.g. Scopus and Web of Science) and ask the service provider to correct any errors concerning your author information.

2. Make your publications and data discoverable

• Your publication should have a persistent identifier (PID). The identifier uniquely identifies the publication and ensures that the publication can be found even if its actual location on the web changes. Persistent identifiers for publications are e.g. URN and DOI.
• As a University researcher, you should save your publications in the TUNICRIS research information system, at TAMK publications are saved in JUSTUS.
• Write in plain language. Use suitably short headlines, informative abstracts, and author's keywords. This increases the discoverability of your publications online.

3. Publish open access

• Publish research results open access whenever possible. Open access publishing makes publications freely available on the internet. This means that the potential readership of open access articles is much larger than that of articles restricted to subscribers, so your articles are much more likely to be uploaded, shared, and cited. There are several ways to publish open access. For more information, see the publishing section of this guide.
• Make all your data open access or partially open when possible. The data can be shared in connection with the publication or made into its own data publication. Open the public description of your data, this way search engines can find it more easily. In connection with the article, it is worth publishing a so-called data availability statement (DAS). Improve the visibility of the data by citing the data you are using. The citation acknowledges the author of the data and helps to identify and locate the data. The citation also helps to monitor the use of the data. For more detailed instructions, see the research data section of this guide.
• Remember also to make methods and educational resources open.

4. Talk about your publications and network

• Network, participate in discussions, and share information about your research publications.
• If you want, join social networking services that suit you, such as ResearchGate and LinkedIn.
• Consider communicating about your research, e.g. on social media.

The term publication channel is usually used to refer to various printed and/or electronic publication series (e.g. journals, book series, and conference series) and book publishers. Typically, publication channels publish selected content aimed at a specific target group, such as experts in a field of science, professionals, or the general public. The publication types defined by the Ministry of Education and Culture are partly based on the division of publication channels by target group.

Scientific publishing is mainly focused on journals, which is why we will next examine the evaluation of journals and what this evaluation says about the visibility of journals. The methods used in evaluating journals indicate the average visibility of the journal. It should also be noted that indicators describing the quality of journals should not be used to draw conclusions about individual articles or researchers.

Journal evaluation methods can be divided into subjective methods (expert evaluation, qualitative evaluation systems such as the Publication Forum, whether peer review is used, the journal's reputation in the field, and whether the journal is indexed in citation databases) and quantitative evaluation methods (journal citation impact indicators such as Journal Impact Factor (JIF), journal usage statistics, and article acceptance or rejection rates).

Below are a few tools that can be used to evaluate journals from different perspectives.

Links to services: