The voting members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved four new projects to develop standards for alternative assessment metrics (altmetrics). The NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics Initiative was begun in July 2013 with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with a goal of building trust and adoption in new methods of assessing impact.
Phase 1 of the project, which was completed this summer, gathered a large array of relevant stakeholder groups to identify what areas of alternative metrics would benefit most from standards-related developments. This input was distilled into a white paper published in June 2014, which was then presented to the NISO community to prioritize the action items as possible NISO work items. Phase 2 of the project will be to develop standards or recommended practices in the prioritized areas of definitions, calculation methodologies, improvement of data quality, and use of persistent identifiers in alternative metrics. As part of each project, relevant use cases and how they apply to different stakeholder groups will be developed.
The approved proposal for the Phase 2 projects as well as the Phase 1 White Paper are available on the NISO website at: www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/. Interested participants from libraries, scholarly publishers, research funders, scholars, university departments of academic affairs, providers of alternative metrics data, and system providers are encouraged to contact NISO.
