Research and publishing network ScienceOpen and Altmetric are collaborating to provide top-level alternative metrics data for over 1 million open access articles in the natural sciences and medicine which are now available on the new platform ScienceOpen.com. The collaboration between the two start-up ventures based in London and Boston/Berlin was announced by Altmetric CEO Euan Adie and ScienceOpen CEO Stephanie Dawson.
The Altmetric features enable the user of ScienceOpen.com to track and analyse the online activity around scholarly literature accessible on the new platform.
In contrast to traditional citations in academic literature, which will appear several months or years after the cited work had been published first, Altmetric enables the user to access all comments or mentions as soon as they are published in social networks such as Facebook or microblogs such as Twitter. The information about the different feedback channels for a given paper are transparently displayed on the ScienceOpen site in the form of the Altmetric badge which retrieves in real time all feedback about an article in the form of a coloured "donut".
Additionally, clicking on this donut in articles published by ScienceOpen will retrieve all comments about that article in full text, and provides further information; for example about the local territory from which the author of the microblog or social media stream comes from.
