It had to happen! Altmetrics is becoming "official"
"The paper summarizes community input to development of
potential standards and recommended practices for research assessment metrics"
The National Information Standards Organization
(NISO) has released a draft white paper summarizing Phase I of its Alternative
Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Project for public comment. The Initiative
was launched in July 2013, with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to
study, propose, and develop community-based standards or recommended practices
for alternative metrics. In Phase 1 of the project, three in-person meetings
were held and 30 in-person interviews conducted to collect input from all relevant
stakeholders, including researchers, librarians, university administrators,
scientific research funders, and publishers. The draft white paper is the
summary of the findings from those meetings and interviews, along with the
identification of potential action items for further work in Phase II of the
project.
“Citation reference counts and the Journal
Impact Factor have historically been the main metric used to assess the quality
and usefulness of scholarship,” explains Martin Fenner, Technical Lead
Article-Level Metrics for the Public Library of Science (PLOS) and consultant
to NISO for the project. “While citations will remain an important component of
research assessment, this metric alone does not effectively measure the
expanded scope of forms of scholarly communication and newer methods of online
reader behavior, network interactions with content, and social media. A
movement around the use of alternative metrics, sometimes called ‘altmetrics,’
has grown to address the limitations of the traditional measures. With any new
methodology, however, issues arise due to the lack of standards or best
practices as stakeholders experiment with different approaches and use
different definitions for similar concepts. NISO’s Altmetrics project gathered
together the variety of stakeholders in this arena to better understand the
issues, obtain their input on what issues could best be addressed with
standards or recommended practices, and prioritize the potential actions. This
white paper organizes and summarizes the valuable feedback obtained from over
400 participants in the project and identifies a road forward for Phase II of
the project.”
“More than 250 ideas were generated by
participants in the meetings and interviews,” states Todd Carpenter, NISO
Executive Director. “We were able to condense these to 25 action items in nine
categories: definitions, research outputs, discovery, research evaluation, data
quality and gaming, grouping and aggregation, context, stakeholders’
perspectives, and adoption. The highest priority items focused on unique
identifiers for scholarly works and for contributors, standards for usage
statistics in the form of views and downloads, and building of infrastructure
rather than detailed metrics analysis. We are now soliciting feedback on the
draft white paper from the wider community prior to its completion. The white
paper will then be used as the basis for Phase II: the development of one or
more of the proposed standards and recommended practices.”
The White Paper is open for public comment
through July 18, 2014. It is available with a link to an online commenting form
on the NISO Altmetrics Project webpage (www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/),
along with the detailed output documents and recordings from each of the
meetings and related information resources.
