Increasing the Visibility of NTROs (2021-2022)

Increasing the Visibility of NTROS (2021-2022)

Project Description

As well as sharing their research findings in journal articles and books, researchers impact their communities via creative forms of research outputs. Researchers in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia create novels, essays, short stories, digital artworks, digital representations of physical artworks such as sculpture, films, theatre performances and scripts for movies and plays. Other researchers at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University share their work as blog posts, news articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, reports, white papers and more. In Australia, these research outputs are sometimes grouped together, and referred to as non-traditional research outputs (or NTROs).

Two streams of research in 2021 and 2022 explored how these types of research outputs could be made more visible. The Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative funded a stream of research focused on creative practice research outputs, while CCAT funded a stream of research focused on grey literature.

Findings

Researchers in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University were interviewed to find out more about how research outputs other than journal articles and books are captured, shared and recognised at Curtin University.

This project found that from a researcher perspective, the process of adding creative practice research outputs in Curtin University systems is laborious and confusing. For researchers who impact their communities via grey literature, these research outputs are not adequately recognised in the current promotions system. A sample of grey literature evaluated was stored on websites rather than in repositories, and missing useful metadata that could help these research outputs to be more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) (https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples).

The project outputs included two reports and a literature review. Two guides for researchers were also created to help them with best practice metadata for describing their research outputs other than journal articles and books, and how to use third-party repositories such as Zenodo.