If you’re contacted by a research communications agency offering to increase the visibility of your work, ask them how exactly they will do this. This model tends to involve co-producing content with the academic then placing it on a random website with no real promo plan. It’s waste of time/funding. If you have the time to co-produce with them you probably have the time to produce it yourself. If you lack the expertise there are plenty of free sources of support for it. If you have the funding hire a freelancer and co-produce something less generic. These firms are to research comms what predatory journals are to scholarly publishing. Don’t get sucked in just because their email promises to solve a problem you have vaguely intended to get round to acting on. Find a lasting solution to that problem instead. Not a bad place to start 👇
Mark Carrigan 