New ImpactStory release: better sign-up, easier importing

Head over to your profile on ImpactStory and have a look around — we’ve made some cool updates!

Today’s release includes a smoother sign-up flow for new users, an easy and graphical way to add products to your existing profile, support for more types of research products (Your twitter account! Your blog on WordPress.com!), and a cleaner profile page.

Check it out, give us feedback, and stay tuned. We’re super excited because this release is a major update behind the scenes (for our nerdy readers: a rewrite into angular.js) — the stage is set for awesome features in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

add videos to your ImpactStory profile!

Scientists make videos. For lots of reasons: to document our protocols, tell the public about our results, raise money, and sometimes just to make fun of ourselves.

Who’s interacting with the videos we make? How many people are watching, sharing, discussing, and even citing them in scientific papers?

You can find out — you can now add your YouTube and Vimeo video research products to your ImpactStory profile! To add a video to your profile, paste the urls to the videos (ie http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d39DL4ed754 or http://vimeo.com/48605764) into the “Product IDs” box when you create a profile, or click the Add Products button on an existing profile.

Behind the scenes, ImpactStory scours the web and gathers data from the video hosting sites and other providers. Here’s an example that has some video views, some ‘likes’, a tweet, and a citation in a PLOS paper:

Got videos? Try it out!

ps We’ve got a few more favorite silly science videos that we’ll add in the comments. Join us — add your favourites in the comments too : )

ImpactStory awarded $300k NSF grant!

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve been awarded a $297,500 EAGER grant from the National Science Foundation to study how automatically-gathered impact metrics can improve the reuse of research software. The grant (posted in its entirety on figshare) has three main components:

First, we’ll improve ImpactStory’s ability to track and display the impact of research software. We’ll build tools to uncover where and how software is downloaded, installed, extended, and used; we’ll also mine the research literature to find how software is being reused to make new studies possible. We’ll present all this impact information in an easy-to-understand dashboard that researchers can share.

Second, we’ll be using quantitative and qualitative approaches to see if this impact data helps promote actual software reuse among researchers. We’ll gather data for a sample of software projects, survey researchers, and track inclusion of impact data in grant, tenure, and promotion materials.

Finally, we’ll work to build an engaged community of researchers to help support the project, starting with a group of ImpactStory Software Impact Advisors; these folks will help us with feedback and ideas, and also let us know when and how they’re using software impact metrics in their own professional practice.

The long-term goal of the project is big: we want to transform the way the research community values software products. This is in turn just one part in the larger transformation of scholarly communication, from a paper-native system to a web-native one.

Of course we’re not going to achieve all that in a two-year grant. But we do think we can offer key support to this revolution in the making, and we can’t wait to get started. Thanks, NSF; it’s going to be an exciting two years!

ImpactStory Sloan grant proposal details

We are very happy to post the full text of our recently-funded Sloan grant proposal:

ImpactStory grant proposal to the Sloan Foundation, 2013. Available on figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.740315

We redacted names and letters of support that we don’t have permission to post publicly, but otherwise the proposal, budget, and response letter are posted in full. Sloan’s process for grants of this size is to send the proposals out for peer review, then forward anonymized representative and/or important excerpts from reviews to the PIs for a quick turn-around response before making their funding decision. When reading, keep in mind this was written in April: some plans and the landscape have of course changed since then!

These documents join a growing number of grant proposals now openly available online. We are delighted by this trend: having concrete examples is a big help to newbies (as we know from personal experience!). Other openly-available Sloan grant proposals:

Have you written grant proposals, Sloan or not, funded or not? Join us in posting them online!

ImpactStory invited to the White House!

ImpactStory went to the White House last week! We were invited to present a poster at the reception following the Open Science Champions of Change award ceremony.

We were thrilled and honored to represent the future of open science beside Jean-Claude Bradley et al on Open Notebook Science, John Wilbanks et al on Portable Consent, and 9 other great initiatives.

Tweeting about the invitation wasn’t allowed till the event, otherwise you would have heard all of our excitement — and the excitement of our moms and 7 year olds — much more directly!

Our poster is available on GitHub under a CC0 license.

Thank you, OSTP, for recognizing the value of Open Science. This was a big day for ImpactStory, but a much bigger day for what we’re passionate about: a world of fast, open, web-native scholarship.

ImpactStory awarded $500k grant from the Sloan Foundation

Supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

We’re delighted to announce that ImpactStory has been awarded a $500k grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Over the next two years, the funds will “support the scaling and further development to sustainability of ImpactStory, a nonprofit open altmetrics platform that helps scholars evaluate, sort, consume, and reward web-native products.”

This grant continues the relationship between ImpactStory and Sloan. ImpactStory was still an evening-and-weekends project running hackathon code when it was awarded $125k from the Sloan Foundation in 2012. This initial funding allowed us to incorporate as a stand-alone nonprofit company, develop a scalable open web application (with context, embeddable widgets, and impact profile pages), and do outreach for open altmetrics.

Thank you, Sloan. Thanks especially to Program Director Josh Greenberg for his advice and encouragement, the grant reviewers for such perceptive feedback, and everyone who wrote us a letter of support.

We are so excited to have this runway! Hold on to your hats, here we go….

new release: ImpactStory Profiles

Your scholarship makes an impact. But if you’re like most of us, that impact isn’t showing up on your publication list. We think that’s broken. Why can’t your online publication list share the full story of your impact?

Today we announce the beginning of a solution: ImpactStory Profiles. Researchers can create and share their impact profiles online under a custom URL, creating an altmetrics-powered CV. For example, http://impactstory.org/CarlBoettiger leads to the impact profile page below:

http://impactstory.org/CarlBoettiger

We’re still in the early stages of our ImpactStory Profile plans, and we’re excited about what’s coming. Now’s a great time to claim your URL — head over and make an impact profile.

And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback: tell us what you think (tweet us at @impactstory or write through the support forum), and spread the word.

Also in this release:

improved import through ORCID
improved login system
lovely new look and feel!

Thanks, and stay tuned… lots of exciting profile features in store in the coming months!

Uncovering the impact of software

Academics — and others — increasingly write software. And we increasingly host it on GitHub. How can we uncover the impact our software has made, learn from it, and communicate this to people who evaluate our work?

GitHub itself gets us off to a great start. GitHub users can “star” repositories they like, and GitHub displays how many people have forked a given software project — started a new project based on the code. Both are valuable metrics of interest, and great places to start qualitatively exploring who is interested in the project and what they’ve used it for.

What about impact beyond GitHub? GitHub repositories are discussed on Twitter and Facebook. For example, the GitHub link to the popular jquery library has been tweeted 556 times and liked on Facebook 24 times (and received 18k stars and almost 3k forks).

Is that a lot? Yes! It is one of the runaway successes on GitHub.

How much attention does an average GitHub project receive? We want to know, to give reference points for the impact numbers we report. Archive.org to the rescue! Archive.org posted a list of all GitHub repositories active in December 2012. We just wanted a random sample of these, so we wrote some quick code to pull random repos from this list, grouped by year the repo was created on GitHub.

Here is our reference set of 100 random GitHub repositories created in 2011. Based on this, we’ve calculated that receiving 3 stars puts you in the top 20% of all GitHub repos created in 2011, and 7 stars puts you in the top 10%. Only a few of the 100 repositories were tweeted, so getting a tweet puts you in the top 15% of repositories.

You can see this reference set in action on this example, rfishbase, a GitHub repository by rOpenSci that provides an R interface to the fishbase.org database:

So at this point we’ve got recognition within GitHub and social media mentions, but what about contribution to the academic literature? Have other people used the software in research?

Software use has been frustratingly hard to track for academic software developers, because there are poor standards and norms for citing software as a standalone product in reference lists, and citation databases rarely index these citations even when they exist. Luckily, publishers and others are beginning to build interfaces that let us query for URLs mentioned within full text of research papers… all of a sudden, we can discover attribution links to software packages that are hidden in not only in reference lists, but also methods sections and acknowledgements! For example, the GitHub url for a crowdsourced repo on an E Coli outbreak has been mentioned in the full text of two PLOS papers, as discovered on ImpactStory:

There is still a lot of work for us all to do. How can we tell the difference between 10 labmates starring a software repo and 10 unknown admirers? How can we pull in second-order impact, to understand how important the software has been to the research paper, and how impactful the research paper was?

Early days, but we are on the way. Type in your github username and see what we find!

Nature Comment: Altmetrics for Alt-Products

One of our goals at ImpactStory is widespread respect for all kinds of research products. We therefore celebrate the upcoming NSF Policy change to BioSketch requirements, instructing investigators to list their notable Products rather than their Publications in all grant proposals. Yay!

This policy change, and the resulting need to gather altmetrics across scholarship, is discussed in a Comment just published in Nature, authored by yours truly:

Piwowar H. (2013). Value all research products., Nature, DOI: 10.1038/493159a

The article is will be behind a paywall but is free for a few days, so run over and read it quickly! 🙂

I’ve also written up a few supplementary blog posts to the Comment, on my personal blog:

the first draft of the article (quite different, and with some useful details that didn’t make it into the final version)
behind-the-scenes look at the editorial and copyright process

And here for convenience is the ImpactStory exemplar mentioned in the article: a data set on an outbreak of Escherichia coli has received 43 ‘stars’ in the GitHub software repository, 18 tweets and two mentions in peer-reviewed articles (see http://impactstory.org/item/url/https://github.com/ehec-outbreak-crowdsourced/BGI-data-analysis).

New widget and API

One of our core goals at ImpactStory has always been to make altmetrics data open and accessible–to help it flow like water amongst providers, applications and platforms. We’re excited today to be announcing two new features pushing us further toward that goal.

First, we’re relaunching our embeddable widget, which shows ImpactStory badges right next to your content. This new version reflects months of coding, testing, and–most importantly–talking to users. It’s lighter, faster, and more robust. You can also embed multiple widgets per page, making it perfect for online CVs or other product lists.

The widget is also way more customizable: you can control size, logo, layout, and other display characteristics. We’ll be rolling out even more display options in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Along with the new widget, we’re also formally releasing Version 1 of our REST API. We’ve been testing this for several weeks now with some of our partners including the recently launched eLife. The new version adds some convenience methods and prunes some unused ones. It also comes with improved documentation at Apiary.io. We love that Apiary lets you see examples of API calls in multiple languages, and even run them right there.

As part of announcing v1, we’re also now announcing that the v0 API is deprecated, and will not be supported after January 1. Let us know if you have any questions or need help moving to the new v1; most of the calls are the same, so should just take a few minutes.

We’d love to have your feedback on both the widget and v1 API. To take either one for a test spin, just drop by our documentation page and request a free API key. And if you’re not already, follow @ImpactStory on Twitter for real-time updates and downtime reports.

Update: we’re no longer offering API keys; the API has been deprecated and turned off. We hope to offer an API again in the near future, one that’s more fully spec’ed out.

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