The Imperative for Open Altmetrics

Abstract

If scholarly communication is broken, how will we fix it? At Impactstory—a non-profit devoted to helping scholars gather and share evidence of their research impact by tracking online usage of scholarship via blogs, Wikipedia, Mendeley, and more—we believe that incentivizing web-native research via altmetrics is the place to start. In this article, we describe the current state of the art in altmetrics and its effects on publishing, we share Impactstory’s plan to build an open infrastructure for altmetrics, and describe our company’s ethos and actions. “Scholarly communication is broken.” We’ve heard this refrain for close to twenty years now, but what does it mean? Academic publishing is still mostly a slow, arduous, and closed process. Researchers have little incentive to experiment with new forms of scholarly communication or make their research freely available at the speed of science, since they’re mainly recognized for publishing journal articles and books: a narrow, very traditional form of scholarly impact. Most arguments attribute academic publishing’s problems to a system that benefits corporate interests or to perverse incentives for tenure and promotion. The solution? Open up research and update our incentive systems accordingly. For too long now, academic publishing has relied on a closed infrastructure that was architected to serve commercial interests. Researchers who attempt to practice open science can find it difficult to get recognition for the impact of open access (OA) publications and research products beyond the journal article, products that include scientific software, data, and so on. Some have already imagined a better future for scholarly communication, one where OA is the norm and a new, open infrastructure serves the diverse needs of scholars throughout the research lifecycle. The decoupled journal is slowly becoming a reality, [1] [#N1] OA publications continue to gain a market share, [2] [#N2] and measuring impact of a diverse set of scholarly outputs through altmetrics is becoming an increasingly common practice for scholars. [3] [#N3] We founded Impactstory with this future in mind. Impactstory [http://impactstory.org] is a non-profit, open source web application that helps researchers gather, understand, and share with others the impact of all their scholarly outputs. We believe that Impactstory and other services that serve scholarly communication are essential to the future of academia. The Imperative for Open Altmetrics http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/idx/j/jep/3336451.0017.301/... 1 of 12 11/3/14, 9:06 PM In this article, we’ll describe the current state of the art in altmetrics and its effects on publishing, share our plan to build an open infrastructure for altmetrics, and describe our company’s ethos and actions. The current publishing ecosystem—and why it needs to be changed Altmetrics—sometimes called “alternative metrics” and defined by Priem, Piwowar, & Hemminger as social media-based metrics for scholarly works [4] [#N4] —are having a major effect on traditional scholarly publishing, but not for all of the reasons you might expect. Traditional academic publishers are masters of vertical integration. Once a manuscript is submitted to a traditional journal for publication, that journal coordinates peer-review, copy-edits, publishes, markets, manages copyright for, and provides scores of other services [5] [#N5] for the published article. In general, this system has done its job relatively well to date—publishing pay-to-read journals. But it has also resulted in a publishing ecosystem that can be harmful to scholars and the public [6] [#N6] : toll access journals with exorbitant subscription fees (as the for-profit publishers seek to expand their ever-widening profit margin [7] [#N7] ) and journal impact factors being used as a proxy for the quality of a published article when evaluating scholars’ work (not the fault of the publishers, to be sure, but they nonetheless contribute to the problem by promoting and sustaining JIF hype). What if we imagined a web-native publishing ecosystem that functioned in an open, networked manner, similar to how much research itself is conducted nowadays? What if we decoupled the services that many journals provide from the journal itself, and had scores of businesses that could provide many of the essential services that authors need, like peer-review, copy editing, marketing—with less overhead and greater transparency? Such a system has the opportunity to foster a scholarly communication environment that benefits scholars and the public, freeing the literature via Open Access publishing, improving the literature through open and post-publication peer review, and understanding the literature’s impact through article-level metrics and altmetrics. Luckily, that new system is in the process of being built. Every day, game-changing publishing services like Publons [https://publons.com/] and Rubriq [http://www.rubriq.com/] (stand-alone peer-review services [8] [#N8] ), Annotum [http://annotum.org/] and PressForward [http://pressforward.org/] (publishing platforms), Dryad [http://datadryad.org/] and Figshare [http://figshare.com/] (data-sharing platforms), and Kudos [https://www.growkudos.com/] (an article marketing service) are debuted. And altmetrics services like Impactstory [https://impactstory.org/] , Altmetric [http://www.altmetric.com/] , PlumX [https://plu.mx/] , and PLOS ALMs [http://article-levelmetrics.plos.org/] are also starting to be widely adopted, by both publishers and scholars alike. The rise of altmetrics Altmetrics are a solution to a problem that increasingly plagues scholars: even in situations where scholarship may be best served by a publishing a dataset, blog post, or other web-native scholarly product, one’s own career is often better served by instead putting that effort into traditional article-writing. If we want to move to a more efficient, web-native science, we must make that The Imperative for Open Altmetrics http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/idx/j/jep/3336451.0017.301/... 2 of 12 11/3/14, 9:06 PM dilemma disappear: what is good for scholarship must become good for the scholar. Instead of assessing only paper-native articles, books, and proceedings, we must build a new system where all types of scholarly products are evaluated and rewarded. The key to this new reward system is altmetrics: a broad suite of online impact indicators that goes beyond traditional citations to measure impacts of diverse products, in diverse platforms, on diverse groups of people. [9] [#N9] Altmetrics leverage the increasing centrality of the Web in scholarly communication, mining evidence of impact across a range of online tools and environments: [/j/jep/images/3336451.0017.301-00000001.jpg] These and other altmetrics promise to bridge the gap between the potential of web-native scholarship and the limitations of the paper-native scholarly reward system. A growing body of research supports the validity and potential usefulness of altmetrics. [10] [#N10] [11] [#N11] [12] [#N12] [13] [#N13] Eventually, these new metrics may power not only research evaluation, but also web-native filtering and recommendation tools. [14] [#N14] [15] [#N15] [16] [#N16] However, this vision of efficient, altmetrics-powered, and web-native scholarship will not occur accidentally. It requires advocacy to promote the value of altmetrics and web-native scholarship, online tools to demonstrate the immediate value of altmetrics as an assessment approach today, and an open data infrastructure to support developers as they create a new, web-native scholarly ecosystem. This is where Impactstory comes in.