You can also publish a book in a well-known publishing house... or, if, for you, it is more important to make your results available to everybody for free, you can also publish your work in a working paper and upload it to your homepage, this site or any other sites of this type.

Sometimes a breakthrough research may not reach proper audience. Though internet facility is now available easily worldwide but its use to know good researches in all areas in questionable. The medium of accessibility of research works should be such as any person with minimum resources can access it and also in such a way that it can be debatable. Earlier this was done through seminars and conferences.

Conferences, Researchgate, Mendeley, Google Scholar (indexes open access articles), SSRN, your own blog/twitter/youtube...

I'd say that giving talks and publishing the results in journals are by far the most important for dissemination of research. After that, the two things you can do to help are to try and make people aware of the existence of the results (talks, blog posts, informal discussions with colleagues and visitors, etc... - all of this tends to be strongly field dependent), and making the paper accessible to everyone (on your web pages, through sites mentioned above, etc...)

I think, first of all the paper should be well written and involving reliable information. Presenting the paper in local or international conferences and publishing it in international, open access, peer reviewed journal, which is indexed by well recognize international database (esp.. midline and PubMed) are the most important means by which you can disseminate your paper. Other means include:

1. distribution of summary document and flyers,

2. hosting community forums and seminars to discuss the research.

3. Joining discussion with others through scientific web sites such as Research Gate.

3. Send a regular newsletter summarizing research in progress.

Dear Rafael,

Although peer-reviewed publications are the main and most important means in a "publish or perish" reality, it alone is by far the most optimal way to insure maximum use and impact of the work.

The funders definition of "Research IMPACT" is no longer just number of papers. Funders that subscribe to Responsible Research and Innovation state that "research" = machine readable and archived data+open source code models+research papers+science based policy briefs+communicating the research to society+engaging citizen scientists where relevant.

In that sense Open Science principles can optimise IMPACT, e.g.:

- publish raw data in central archives insuring use and reuse;

- publish secondry data analysis as peer-reviewed data paper (some disciplines have peer reviewed data journals);

- publish model code in GitHub, Google Code etc;

- publish a research paper that builds on all above components and cites their DOIs;

- make your research paper open access, either by choosing a high quality OA journal, or if none available for that discipline, deposit the post-print (after peer review corrections) in a repository (your discipline does not have one? EU & CERN offer one www.zenodo.org);

- make a presentation or short vidoe of the research paper for non-specialist audience (even Elsevier journals are now offering and advocating this to authors), and promote through social networks;

- seek topical discussion fora and discuss/explain the implications of the research.

Funders are also keen on ALTMETRICS apps recently appearing as they gauge the visibility of a research paper in all streams of social media. Authors should be keen on this too, after all social media allows us to multiply the discussion just like our favourite conferences do, but on a scale.

Thanks Rafael, for the question and the link that you have given. For me here in Malaysia, I prefer to send my papers for conferences. I am most happy to make all the necessary corrections, because these things help to improve the quality of the paper. I find that journals take a long time to review, even the Malaysian journals.

Unfortunately though, it seems (in my country) that when a paper is accepted and published as a proceeding, I can't send it to a science education journal anymore. Is this so in other places? What is your related experience/s?

Hi Rafael: Besides journal publications, so many other avenues are available for disseminating your research results for common cause. In my opinion you may make use of the social networking sites for disseminating your findings to the mass. ResearchGate is another better option since they provide opportunity to publish any kind of research output apart from journal / conference papers.

@Rathinasabapathy, yes, I agree that RG is a good option for that reason. Data-sets can also be uploaded, if we think that it will be useful to other researchers and students. RG helps to disseminate our research to a larger audience :)

You may take the help of researchgate or you may subscribe a personal web site to disseminate your research activities.