RTI Press

This paper argues that support for citizen participation and accountability among civil society actors can consolidate local deliberative spaces and improve the performance of local government.

Ensuring a stable and healthful food supply for the world’s growing population has become increasingly urgent, particularly in the face of climate change. In spite of expected increases in food production in developing countries, the number of people at risk of hunger is predicted to grow, especially in the world’s poorest regions. While technology is not a panacea, it is critical to addressing the food production side of the food security equation. The social, economic, and other factors that affect technology adoption are complex and varied, requiring research that combines natural and social sciences to understand how best to influence the uptake and sustained use of effective technologies. Research should focus on four areas where complex combinations of challenges inhibit adoption. Understanding (1) farm-level, (2) economic, and (3) policy barriers would illuminate where promising innovations may be viable. Further, researchers should explore which approaches most effectively drive adoption of (4) combinations of agricultural practices and technologies.

Digital publishing holds the promise of global dissemination of research findings. Small publishers, however, face numerous obstacles to making their publications discoverable: budget/personnel constraints, marketplace competition, a vast array of formats and types of metadata available, and so on. Where is a small publisher to start? This poster summarizes RTI Press’s efforts to boost our discoverability. By looking at what worked and what didn’t work, we demonstrate how other small scholarly publishers can develop discoverability strategies and tactics that are cost-efficient, tailored to the appropriate audience, and effective. Since implementing these strategies, RTI Press had a 29% YOY increase in citations in fiscal year 2020 and a 32% increase in fiscal year 2021. RTI Press is a global publisher of peer-reviewed, diamond open-access publications. We are also the small scholarly publishing arm of RTI International, our parent research institution. Because of our size, various institutional constraints, and the fact that we publish less traditional formats, we experience many of the obstacles small presses face in sharing their publications. We used a twofold approach to investing in our discoverability. First, we made cultural investments: getting leadership buy-in, educating researchers, using researcher networks to promote publications, determining reader needs, and collaborating with our library services and corporate communications team. Second, we made technological investments by using analytics to determine our readers’ habits, improving our metadata, integrating additional metadata by using persistent identifiers and an institutional repository, indexing our publications where our readers can find them, and improving our website’s SEO.