NISO Issues Altmetrics White Paper Draft for Comment

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.

Snakes or Ladders? Evaluating a LibGuides Pilot at UCD Library

(Interesting - time we evaluated our LibGuides???? )

"Feedback that was gathered suggested that the LibGuides subject guides were generally viewed very positively by both staff and students. Notwithstanding this, awareness (as indicated through usage statistics) remained moderate during the pilot, pointing to the importance of the visibility, positioning and promotion of guides."

article in The Journal of Academic Librarianship

2 June 2014

Abstract

Online subject guides are commonly used by libraries to provide information support to students. LibGuides (a cloud-based commercial product launched in 2007) represents one of the latest incarnations of the traditional subject guide or portal, and are widely used across American academic libraries. In Ireland however, library subject guides of entirely local design and hosted on a local web server still dominate.

This paper outlines the project management process involved in implementing a LibGuides pilot at University College Dublin Library, including the planning, design and implementation of a new range of subject-related guides. The pilot nature of the project necessitated a strong focus on evaluation, particularly in assessing the effectiveness and suitability of LibGuides as a platform for delivering information literacy support, both from an administrative and end-user perspective. A two-stranded approach was used in this review process, incorporating quantitative web statistics and analytics alongside qualitative feedback from students, academic staff and Library staff.

Feedback that was gathered suggested that the LibGuides subject guides were generally viewed very positively by both staff and students. Notwithstanding this, awareness (as indicated through usage statistics) remained moderate during the pilot, pointing to the importance of the visibility, positioning and promotion of guides.

Resignations threat over Taylor & Francis ‘censorship’

“A journal’s editorial board has been left on the brink ofresignation after an eight-month standoff with its publisher Taylor &Francis over the publication of a debate on academic publishing and the profitsmade by major firms…..”

Top trends in academic libraries

Top trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education(Coll. res. libr. news June 2014 75:294-302)

Data -New initiatives and collaborative opportunities - Cooperative roles for researchers, repositories, and journal publishers - Partnerships related to discovery and re-use of data - Device neutral digital services - Evolving openness in higher education - open access - open education - student success - Funding, student success initiatives, and accreditation - libraries, student success, and demonstrating value - Competency-based learning - Altmetrics - Digital humanities

 

The ultimate guide to staying up-to-date on your articles’ impact

ImpactStory has just published this useful webpage on “the services that deliver essential research impact metrics straight to your inbox, so you can stay up to date without having to do a lot of work.”

The ultimate guide to staying up-to-date on your articles’ impact