Introducing My APO+

We are excited to bring you My APO+ — a membership service that saves you time by tailoring content to meet your needs. This is a new phase in the evolution of APO that supports our goal of making research and policy accessible and useable to support more evidence-informed decision-making. APO Director, Brigid van Wanrooy, explains.

Tailored for you

APO is a rich repository of over 45,000 resources (and counting) that cover the full breadth of public policy, from science and technology, the built and natural environment to health, education, Indigenous and social issues. There is a lot to browse and search! 

And we know this from you, our users. In our last newsletter subscriber survey we heard that you sometimes struggle with the volume of content, and you want it more organised and subject-based. So, with that in mind, we have developed My APO+. 

My APO+ is all about saving you time, by helping you create your own dashboard of policy and research resources, authors, and publishers that meet your needs.

My APO+ features

My APO+ offers members a range of features (accessible from your My APO+ dashboard) to curate and manage policy and research resources, and to stay up to date with the latest releases.

My APO+ newsletters

Select from these subject-based newsletters, delivered to your inbox every fortnight: 

• Health
• Social Justice (includes justice and international relations)
• Education
• Indigenous Affairs
• Government & Business (includes national security).

Saved searches

Get alerts when new resources meeting your search criteria are added to APO – choose from hourly, daily, or weekly notifications. 

This is a feature I’m quite excited about! I’ve been using it over the last several months with the subject term ‘COVID-19’. It’s been so helpful to stay on top of the wide range of research and policy that has been produced in relation to the pandemic. I’ve been able to quickly review the titles and click on the resources I want to know more about. It could also be used to keep track of policy or research publications from a particular organisation. 

It’s a great way to keep your finger on the pulse — and impress your colleagues with your knowledge of the latest releases!

Metrics button

Want to know how many times a resource has been used? Track page views, downloads and shares of any resource on APO. 

We know this will be of great interest to researchers and publishers on APO. This, along with the ability to add your own resources to APO, enables authors to reach our extensive public policy and research community, and gauge the level of engagement with their work.

My experts

Are there particular authors that are influential in your field? Or authors that publish ‘must read’ resources, but do so infrequently?  My experts enables you to keep track of resources by your chosen authors.  In addition to links to your experts’ profile pages, your My APO+ dashboard will also list the latest content from them.

Read later list

How many times have you perused an APO newsletter or browsed the website and thought, “I must come back to that resource and read it”, only to get distracted by more immediate tasks? Well this feature is for you! My APO+ members will have the ability to click the ‘Read Later’ button on all search results and resource pages, and your reading list will appear on your dashboard.

The evolution of APO

Adding My APO+ membership is a new step in the evolution of APO. Since 2002, we have provided a free service to our website users and newsletter subscribers. To continue to sustain and grow, this new service will have a membership fee of $132 per year. This will allow us to continue to meet the policy community’s needs and thrive as a self-sustainable public good. It will also mean that our repository, the ability to contribute resources, and selection of generalist newsletters (Policy Weekly and Policy Pulse) can remain free. 

So, if you benefit from APO’s services or you think open access to research and policy is important for a well-functioning society, please consider becoming a member of My APO+.