Secrets to Changing Behavior in Scholarly Communication: A 2025 NISO Training Series

Scope

Getting the attention of faculty, students, decision-makers, and others and convincing them to break out of long-established habits to try something new is a defining aspect working in scholarly communications. 

Putting compelling messages in front of the right audiences at the right time, and moving them to action is a well-honed science in especially consumer marketing. The world’s biggest brands are masters at using marketing to convince us to use their particular shampoo, to eat things with little if any nutritional value, and to do what they say we should with our physical appearances.

We can borrow the secret sauce from consumer marketing to advance scholarly communication – and nudge researchers toward other choices, more effectively promote new services and solutions on campus, and gain more powerful traction for our work. 

“Social marketing” is the key. First coined as a term in the public health sector in the 1990s, social marketing specifically refers to the application of commercial marketing principles and practices to effect social and behavioral change. In public health, this has meant promoting seatbelts, bicycle helmets, vaccines, and much, much more. 

Social marketing is the framework for us to convert strategies and tactics from the commercial sector that can be off-putting in the world of research (such as sales) to be effective in realizing the types of behaviour change we aim to realize – whether that’s for researchers to publish in a new journal, share their work in a new way or at a different time, or for campus administrators to make different investment decisions, etc.  

This course will introduce social marketing and the importance of combining strategic interventions with effective marketing to influence behaviour change. 

Through a combination of presentations, invited speakers, readings, exercises, breakout groups and lots of discussion time, participants will learn how to:

1. Identify opportunities to redirect behaviour. 
2. Communicate powerfully by separating audiences according to their different perspectives.
3. Get the most out of an outreach program by prioritizing specific audiences.
4. Build a compelling offering by aligning the service with the audience’s needs and available choices.
5. Cut through the noise by creating messages in the audience’s voice.
6. Develop a comprehensive, impactful outreach program that gets attention from the right people.
7. Monitor the program and make regular improvements to try to increase impact.

Training Facilitator

Jennifer Gibson is a seasoned leader in open research and scholarly communication. She is the Executive Director of Dryad, the open-access repository and curation service for international research data, bringing with her extensive experience in advancing open science. Prior to Dryad, Jennifer served as Head of Open Research Communication at eLife in Cambridge, UK, where she was a founding member since late 2011. At eLife, she collaborated with researchers, funders, publishers, and developers to accelerate science through innovative, open research practices and technology. Before her tenure at eLife, Jennifer directed Programs and Operations at SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition) in Washington, DC, where she championed transformative approaches to scholarly publishing. Her diverse background and commitment to open research make her a valuable asset in supporting global research data curation and accessibility.

Course Duration and Dates

The series consists of four (4) weekly segments, each lasting 90 minutes. Specific dates are:

• June 5, 12, 18, 26

Each session will be recorded and links to that archived recording will be disseminated to course registrants within 2 business days of the close of the specific session.