The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has released a draft white paper summarising 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.
According to Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, more than 250 ideas were generated by participants in the meetings and interviews. These were then condensed 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. NISO is 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.
