ATGthePodcast 309 - A Conversation with Rachel Miles, Research Impact Coordinator, Virginia Tech University Libraries

Today's episode features guest host Michael Upshall (guest editor, Charleston Briefings) who talks with Rachel Miles, Research Impact Coordinator, Virginia Tech University Libraries. Rachel is "an expert in the applications and impacts of research in academia and the public sphere: how it's communicated, what makes it most visible to different audiences and why, what makes it "impactful" and how this impact is tracked, as well as how academics perceive impact when they publish, go up for promotion and tenure, and how they view it from a philosophical perspective throughout the different stages of their careers." She is also a strong supporter of open access. In this conversation, Rachel talks with Michael about how her first degree was in psychology, but she became interested in librarianship while teaching English in South Korea.  She wanted to help people with their research more directly. She didn't yet know how, but she wanted to be the service point where people could really get the insight that they need to understand the literature.  Her interest in metrics began during her last semester in grad school while she was a graduate administrative assistant doing survey research on what LIS professionals do with research impact metrics. She was very interested in this because it's a behavioral field in many ways, but it's also a field that looks at policy, procedure and ethics. Rachel believes that having a diversity of backgrounds is good for libraries and, for her field, she feels that her psychology degree is useful because research impact, research evaluation, and bibliometrics tend to be deeply tied to human behavior as it relates to scientists. Rachel also talks with Michael about the rise of research impact and metrics, altmetrics and policy citations and the future of research evaluation. The video of this interview can be found here: https://youtu.be/xjvkwZOXhHI Social Media: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mupshall/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelamiles/ Keyword #LibraryScience #LIS #InformationScience #Research #ResearchImpact #ResearchEvaluation #ImpactMetrics #ResearchAccessibility #Altmetrics #Bibliometrics #OpenAccess #PolicyCitations #KnowledgeEquity #KnowledgeForAll #Innovation #career #scholcomm #ScholarlyCommunication #libraries #librarianship #LibraryNeeds #LibraryLove #ScholarlyPublishing #AcademicPublishing #publishing #LibrariesAndPublishers #podcasts