Institutional services as drivers for a transition to open scholarship: a presentation at the altmetrics 2:AM conference

Back in October I presented at the altmetrics 2:AM conference in Amsterdam in the 'altmetrics and open science section'.

The causal effect to the impact of scholarly outputs disseminated under an open model may be mirrored in the statistical analysis provided by Altmetrics. We at Brunel University London have a longstanding commitment for open access to our research outputs, going back over ten years. A single campus, community focused institution, our services and systems been tailored to support our scholars and effect cultural change during the transition toward open scholarship.

I talk about how the evolution of our systems deployment has led to a support network that facilitates University publishing for new, open forms of scholarly output and that enables the monitoring of traditional published outputs through green, gold or paywall distribution models. Our publishing systems include an Institutional Repository (IR) and FigShare Data Repository. Our Current Research Information System (CRIS) provides the mechanism to monitor publication trends across our entire portfolio.

With the monitoring of open academic activity fully supported by the CRIS along with partner services Cottage Labs, DOAJ, Sherpa and Core, I  outline how we developed a small centralised service around these tools tailored to foster engagement and to transform dissemination practice across our community.

Alongside the proliferation of social tools for researchers has been the growth of alternative metrics. From our services at ground level we are well positioned to comment on the divide that exists between those researchers who actively use their social media networks to promote the discovery of their output and those who don’t.

I discuss our ‘Altmetric for Institutions’ setup, which monitors the records held in our CRIS. I will demonstrate how this information is shared with authors, research managers and marketing to benefit different areas of institution, but in particular how this provides a powerful visual prompt to users of our service who may be unsure about the academic return of the open movements in real terms.

We are beginning to see how the data we work with every day could be used to extend the discovery of our academics work and to promote the institutions reputation in this space. We curate a huge range of high quality metadata within our CRIS; keywords, subjects and themes to name but a few. We want to see better ways of using this data to select and promote our publications across the social sphere – ideally making use of and developing our existing local networks and the networks of our researchers, and I will speak to our progress in this area so far.

I will conclude by arguing that the clear, mutualistic relationship between the altmetrics and open science movements necessitates effective co-operation with local university services to bring about a smooth and swift transition for authors to the open scholarly model.

Impressions of 2:AM

​It's been 5 years since the subject of ‘altmetrics’ was incepted ​through a manifesto, and brought forward into academic consciousness. The second annual altmetrics conference, 2:AM, was held this year at the science park in Amsterdam.

Altmetrics intend to measure impact of scholars and scholarly documents not captured by traditional bibliometrics, which are usually restricted to counting peer-reviewed journal articles and citations within them. The diverse set of altmetrics are mostly derived from social media but sometimes expand to online events that have existed long before the web 2.0 context, such as mainstream news media, policy documents, library holdings and downloads.

As a movement it has wider ambitions. It seeks not only restrict its function to counts and measures, but also to apply authentication to social engagement. This has implications for the way that research is accepted by the academic community and the way ideas are communicated and filtered for discovery. Against this background, there was discussion around the validity and meaning of social media metrics in scholarly context as well as the sustainable and op​en access to impact data.

It’s an interesting event with dramatic implications for the future of research. For those who might be interested in attending in the future, there is an opportunity to apply for a travel grant. Most delegates were able to get access to this fund to support attendance.