As part of our Sloan Foundation grant process, we were asked to come up with some measurable outcomes. This ended up being a really valuable exercise, and I anticipate we’ll be checking back with these pretty regularly.

We expect not only to reach these goals by April 2013, but also that our chosen metrics will be increasing across the board. Here they are:

• overall visibility: (50k visits, 30k unique visitors, 500 tweets, 30 blog posts, 60 github watchers, 20 forks)
• scholars: embedding or linking to TI reports on their homepage/CV (n=100), some of whom present these in annual reviews or T&P packages (n=25)
• publishers, repositories, and tools: embedding the total-impact widget on articles/datasets (15 organisations)
• researchers: gathering data for research studies using TI (5 in-progress or published papers)

Of course, in keeping with our open and agile approach, we’ll likely end up modifying these some in response to experience and feedback from the community (if you’ve got ideas on how to improve these, we’d love to hear ‘em). But we reckon they’re a pretty good start.