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Congratulations! Good Job!
In a hugely competitive research landscape, publishing is no longer the last step in the research process. Instead, it is the first step in making sure your work has impact. Over the past academic year we’ve shared proven, effective steps to make sure your hard work gets out there, gets attention, and makes a difference — both within your field and with the public.
If you’ve followed along with us, congratulations! We’re proud of you! You’ve successfully done the work that will help you supercharge your scholarly impact! You’re now an open, web-savvy scholar who’s made valuable connections online and in real life. You’re sharing more of your work than you were before, and you’ve found many new ways to get your work to those who are interested. AND you’re able to track the success of your efforts and the real-time impact of your scholarship.
Next Steps
We know it’s unlikely that any of you completed every single one of these challenges, and that’s okay. We’ve enjoyed sharing these strategies and tools with you each week, and the content is not going away. Instead, we’ll be spending our time making this content even more accessible and applicable to you. You’ll have more opportunities to work on these activities.
Here are some of our plans for the OU Impact Challenge in the 2019-2020 academic year (and beyond):
- Each chapter will remain accessible from the OU Impact Challenge main page.
- We’ll be “bundling” each chapter up into an ebook.
- You’ll be able to download the entire ebook from the OU Impact Challenge main page.
- We’ll also upload the ebook to SHAREOK so that scholars across the world can find it and reuse it. And, of course, we will be tracking the number of downloads!
- We will be re-packaging the existing content into several different smaller modules. Only have four days to devote to the OU Impact Challenge? We’ll show you the activities that will be the most beneficial in your limited time. Are you a STEM faculty member with a busy research agenda? We’ll provide a different module that focuses on tools that are most relevant to you. Are you an early career graduate student without a lot of publications? There will be a module for you! And so on.
- We will be establishing an impact challenge learning community so that a small group of us can meet in person for deeper dives in a collaborative, supportive environment.
- If you’ve signed up for the weekly OU Impact Challenge emails, you will no longer receive them each week. We may be reaching out to you with some assessment questions though.
- We will be conducting general assessment and evaluation of the OU Impact Challenge as a whole, along with a look at how individual chapters and activities were used.
- We will be increasing the number of workshops associated with the OU Impact Challenge.
- Finally, we will be publishing special updates and supplements to the existing OU Impact Challenge content. This landscape is changing quickly, and new tools and services are being developed every day. We want you to keep up with these changes!
Thank You, Thank You, Thank YOU
Thank you to all of YOU who have joined in. We’ve enjoyed talking with everyone who’s participated in the OU Impact Challenge and who’s engaged us in conversations during our workshops, on Twitter, at office hours, or just in the lobbies, hallways, and sidewalks of the University of Oklahoma. Thanks for getting involved! And feel free to reach out if you’ve got ideas for directions we can take in the future.
Many thanks to the researchers whose online professional profiles we’ve borrowed in order to illustrate each chapter. We’d also like to thank the illustrators and photographers who openly licensed their creative works for reuse.
The OU Impact Challenge could not have happened without the support of many librarians, faculty, staff, and administrators at the University of Oklahoma. There are too many of you to acknowledge here, but we will be acknowledging you individually in the OU Impact Challenge ebook. Your feedback and support was critical and valuable.
Finally, as we indicate (but don’t explicitly say) at the bottom of every OU Impact Challenge chapter – we are entirely indebted to Stacy Konkiel, the author of The 30-Day Impact Challenge. Without her work, the OU Impact Challenge would not exist. Thank you, Stacy, for making your work openly available and for being our champion.
Content for the OU Impact Challenge has been derived from “The 30-Day Impact Challenge” by Stacy Konkiel © ImpactStory and used here under a CC BY 4.0 International License.
The OU Impact Challenge is licensed CC BY 4.0, unless otherwise noted.