Kudos, which helps authors and institutions maximize the impact and visibility of their publications, has announced new clients including the American Society for Microbiology, Emerald Group Publishing, Health Affairs, IOP Publishing, Maney Publishing, OECD, Royal Society Publishing, Thieme Publishers and Wiley.
Authors use the Kudos service to explain their work in "plain English" (to increase its accessibility), to share these explanations via email and social media (to increase discoverability), and to measure the effects of these activities on abstract views, downloads and Altmetric scores. During the company's 2013 pilot phase, articles that were explained and shared by their authors using Kudos' tools saw an average of 19 percent higher daily downloads than a control group of articles for which Kudos' tools were not used.
The Kudos platform is currently undergoing substantial re-development and will be re-launched in April 2014. Any researcher will be able to register for free, to use the site for explaining and sharing any article, though usage data will only be available for articles added by participating publishers.