In December 2020, R Discovery, a literature search and reading platform, forged a unique partnership with IOP Publishing (IOPP), a scientific publisher owned by the Institute of Physics, with the goal of enhancing global access to high-quality physics research. Today, IOPP’s journals are widely discovered and read on the R Discovery platform by researchers from leading global universities known for physics research, both in developed and emerging countries. In the past few months alone, R Discovery users have spent more than 100,000 minutes reading or listening to IOPP’s journal abstracts and article summaries, solidifying the publisher’s global impact!
On the third anniversary of this collaboration, we reflect on the driving forces along the way. We look specifically at the benefits R Discovery has been able to reap for both IOP Publishing (IOPP) and the global academic community.
Objective: Ensuring seamless discovery and reading of Physics research by academics around the world
In 2020, IOPP had completed 100 years of propelling scientific discoveries in Physics research as an academics publisher and wanted to do more. It wanted to expand its readership and reach, making Physics research accessible to academics from all backgrounds and in every corner of the world. This is where R Discovery, by Cactus Communications, emerged as the perfect partner with its cutting-edge AI technology, availability across devices, and a growing global base of academic users.
The partnership, announced in December 2020, made IOPP’s entire repository of high-quality Physics research articles available on R Discovery, offering academics a better way to discover, read, or listen to the latest, most relevant research in physics and related science disciplines.
Commenting on the partnership, Abhishek Goel, CEO & Co-founder at CACTUS, had said, “Our aim is to bring the most relevant and recently published scientific literature to the fingertips of researchers in Physics across all universities and institutions. By providing access to top quality research published in IOPP’s journals, we can facilitate content discovery and help save reading time for Physicists.”
Solution: Innovations to make IOPP articles more accessible to Physicists using R Discovery
This was the first of 20+ publisher collaborations for R Discovery, which now has a robust base of more than 2.7 million academic users worldwide.
Since the partnership, R Discovery added several innovative features to enhance IOPP visibility and make its journal articles more accessible to its users.
Dedicated publisher channel for IOP Publishing
While R Discovery’s personalized reading recommendations improved IOPP article readership, the team recognized that 33% of its users habitually read research by specific publishers in their field. This led to the introduction of dedicated publisher channels, which collates scholarly articles from journals published by trusted houses such as IOPP, making it easy for researchers to find and access articles by their preferred publishers in one place.
Institutional logins to access paywalled content
On the literature search and reading journey, we know that subscriptions are required to read full-text journal articles, unless the article you want to read is open access. Recognizing this barrier, R Discovery enabled institutional logins on its platform. Users can save their institutes’ details to their profiles and the AI directly checks with publishers to ensure the institute has a subscription. If the subscriptions are in place, users get full access to journal articles that are current, vetted, and relevant to their search, without having to install any additional software or updates.
R Discovery saw a 20% jump in full-text article views for those who included their institution in their profiles. This was significant as it allowed researchers to delve deeper into their chosen subjects like Physics or read IOPP journal articles, leading to more comprehensive and insightful research.
Curated feed of paywalled journal articles
To further personalize user experience, R Discovery created personalized Paywalled papers feeds for users with recommendations for best-matched articles based on their interests. As users searched and engaged with content, the AI algorithm learnt their preferences and fine-tuned its recommendations, creating more meaningful reading suggestions over time. R Discovery users could also choose from the diversified feed options, including Open Access feeds, journal feeds, and publisher channels, depending on what they wanted to read.
Choice to listen on the go or read in their own language
R Discovery also introduced productivity-boosting features such as audio streaming that allows users to listen to research on the go and AI translation capabilities that allow users to read research in their own language. This, along with the ability to collaborate on or share reading lists with peers and team members increased the appeal of IOPP’s journal articles.
Result: Significant value for both IOP Publishing and physicists across top universities worldwide
With these innovative features and flexible research reading options, the IOP Publishing and R Discovery partnership successfully eliminated barriers to research for Physics researchers globally.
- IOPP journals are read by researchers from top 10 universities for Physics research, including MIT, Stanford, UCLA, Harvard, University of Tokyo, Tsinghua and Peking Universities in China, and Université Paris-Saclay in France.
- R Discovery also expanded IOPP readership to researchers from newer geographies, such as National Autonomous University of Mexico, Tel Aviv University of Israel, Australian National University, and all other top global institutions including those from emerging markets.
- In the past few months, R Discovery users spent over 100,000 minutes reading IOPP journal abstracts and article summaries, with the US, UK, Japan, China, and India being the top countries where these researchers are based.
- R Discovery’s creation of the IOPP publisher channels and its personalized recommendations, which is ranked positively by 93% of our users, increased the discoverability of physics articles.
- IOPP journals saw the highest interest from researchers in the US, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Japan, China, and India as well as several emerging markets for research, including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Nigeria.
The IOP Publishing and R Discovery collaboration shows how such strategic partnerships can create value for academic publishers and researchers globally. Publishers can amplify their reach, visibility, and impact by leveraging R Discovery’s intuitive features to improve research consumption among the platform’s growing base of over 2.7 million academic users. It also allows publishers to expand their reach and target specific subject areas and geographies as per their priorities.
If you are interested in owning a publisher channel on R Discovery, write to discovery@researcher.life and we will be happy to make this happen.
R Discovery is a literature search and research reading platform that accelerates your research discovery journey by keeping you updated on the latest, most relevant scholarly content. With 250M+ research articles sourced from trusted aggregators like CrossRef, Unpaywall, PubMed, PubMed Central, Open Alex and top publishing houses like Springer Nature, JAMA, IOP, Taylor & Francis, NEJM, BMJ, Karger, SAGE, Emerald Publishing and more, R Discovery puts a world of research at your fingertips.
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