NISO’s Altmetrics Initiative

Nettie Lagace (@abugseye)ICIS Meeting, UC Davis

February 14, 2014

What is NISO?

• Non-profit industry trade association accredited by ANSI with 150+ members

• Mission of developing and maintaining standards related to information, documentation, discovery and distribution of published materials and media

• Represent US interests to ISO TC46 (Information and Documentation) and also serve as Secretariat for ISO TC46/SC 9 (Identification and Description)

• Responsible for standards like ISSN, DOI, Dublin Core metadata, DAISY digital talking books, OpenURL, SIP, NCIP, MARC records and ISBN (indirectly)

• Volunteer driven organization: 400+ spread out across the world

Premise of “Standards”

• Consensus standards created by a community with various stakeholders

• Trust• Leading to broader acceptance• Standards as plumbing• Standards facilitate trade, commerce and innovation• Standards reduce costs• Standards support better communication and

interoperability across systems

ANSI Standards

• Openness, lack of dominance, balance = everyone affected has a voice

• Notifications, consideration of views and objections

• Consensus votes and appeals• ANSI patent policy, commercial terms and

conditions• Publication and maintenance• Credible & have Integrity

The Altmetrics Project

• Came out of breakout session at (ACM) altmetrics12 meeting in Chicago, June 2012

• Funded by grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation• Premise of grant award: To help facilitate the

adoption of altmetrics, development of community consensus standards can help address limitations and gaps that currently exist

• Identify and prioritize needs and requirements

Why worth funding?

• Scholarly assessment is critical to the overall process– Which projects get funded– Who gets promoted and tenure– Which publications are prominent

• Assessment has been based on citation since the 60s

• Today’s scholars multiple types of interactions with scholarly content are not reflected– Is “non-traditional” scholarly output important too?

Why worth funding?

• In order to move out of “pilot” and “proof-of-concept” phases …

• Altmetrics must coalesce around commonly understood definitions, calculations and data sharing practices

• Altmetrics must be able to be audited • Organizations who want to apply metrics will

need to understand them and ensure consistent application and meaning across the community

What’s to Standardize?

• Field is too new … no existing practice to build on• Standards should not be “invented” / codified• A diversion from the real work that needs to be

done– No community practice: administrators, granting orgs

etc. need accepted, trustworthy, verifiable info– This project is not taking place overnight; two stages

for a reason– NISO open process invites engagement from all

A few Questions about Altmetrics

• What gets measured (counted)?• What are criteria for assessing quality of these

measures?• How granular should the metrics be to enable

computation and analysis?• What period(s) should the metrics cover?• What technical infrastructure is necessary to

enable the exchange of the metrics data?

2 Phases

• Phase 1: Hold meetings of stakeholders to define a high-level list of issues– October 2013, San Francisco– December 2013, Washington, DC– January 2014, Philadelphia– Public Webinars– White paper output, public presentations, public feedback

• Phase 2: Create Working Group within NISO structure, to create recommended practice(s) and/or standard(s)– Education/training efforts to ensure implementation

• Final report to Sloan due November 2015

niso.org

Linked from niso.org

Steering Committee

• Euan Adie, Altmetric• Amy Brand, Harvard University• Mike Buschman, Plum Analytics• Todd Carpenter, NISO• Martin Fenner, Public Library of Science (PLoS) (Chair)• Michael Habib, Reed Elsevier• Gregg Gordon, Social Science Research Network (SSRN)• William Gunn, Mendeley• Nettie Lagace, NISO• Jamie Liu, American Chemical Society (ACS)• Heather Piwowar, ImpactStory• John Sack, HighWire Press• Peter Shepherd, Project Counter• Christine Stohn, Ex Libris• Greg Tananbaum, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)

Meeting Format

• Livestreamed (video recordings now available)• Morning: lightning talks, post-it brainstorming• Afternoon: discussion groups – Business and use cases– Qualitative/quantitative– Quality and data science– Data integrity– Definitions– Future proofing

Next Steps (Phase 1)

• Review and process all input from meetings• Additional 1-on-1 interviews • Community input via niso.ideascale.com• Preparation of white paper• Public webinar(s) to discuss draft white paper• White paper/work proposal finalized; vetted

and approved by NISO leadership and members• Phase 2 to begin ~September 2014

nlagace@niso.org@abugseye

http://www.niso.org

Thank you!