[Asis-l] NISO Issues Altmetrics White Paper Draft for Comment

[NISO]

NISO Issues Altmetrics White Paper Draft for Comment
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.

 

 

Cynthia Hodgson

Technical Editor / Consultant

National Information Standards Organization

chodgson at niso.org

301-654-2512

 

 

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