Author: Heather

Now, a better way to find and reward open access

There’s always been a wonderful connection between altmetrics and open science.

Altmetrics have helped to demonstrate the impact of open access publication. And since the beginning, altmetrics have excited and provoked ideas for new, open, and revolutionary science communication systems. In fact, the two communities have overlapped so much that altmetrics has been called a “school” of open science.

We’ve always seen it that way at Impactstory. We’re uninterested in bean-counting. We are interested in setting the stage for a second scientific revolution, one that will happen when two open networks intersect: a network of instantly-available diverse research products and a network of comprehensive, open, distributed significance indicators.

So along with promoting altmetrics, we’ve also been big on incentives for open access. And today we’re excited that we got a lot better at it.

We’re launching a new Open Access badge, backed by a really accurate new system for automatically detecting fulltext for online resources. It finds not just Gold OA, but also self-archived Green OA, hybrid OA, and born-open products like research datasets.

A  lot of other projects have worked on this sticky problem before us, including the Open Article Gauge, OACensus, Dissemin, and the Open Access Button. Admirably, these have all been open-source projects, so we’ve been able to reuse lots of their great ideas.

Then we’ve added oodles of our own ideas and techniques, along with plenty of research and testing. The result? Impactstory is now the best, most accurate way to automatically assess openness of publications. We’re proud of that.

And we know this is just the beginning! Fork our code or send us a pull request if you want to make this even better. Here’s a list of where we check for OA to get you started:

  • The Directory of Open Access Journals to see if it’s in their index of OA journals,
  • CrossRef’s license metadata field,  to see if the publisher has uploaded an open license.
  • Our own custom list DOI prefixes, to see if it’s in a known preprint repo
  • DataCite, to see if it’s an open dataset.
  • The wonderful BASE OA search engine to see if there’s a Green OA copy of the article.
  • Repository pages directly, in cases where BASE was unable to determine openness.
  • Journal article pages directly, to see if there’s a free PDF link (this is great for detecting hybrid OA)

What’s it mean for you? Well, Impactstory is now a powerful tool for spreading the word about open access. We’ve found that seeing that openness badge–or OH NOES lack of a badge!–on their new profile is powerful for a researcher who might otherwise not think much about OA.

So, if you care about OA: challenge your colleagues to go make a free profile and see how open they really are. Or you can use our API to learn about the openness of groups of scholars (great for librarians, or for a presentation to your department). Just hit the endpoint http://impactstory.org/u/someones_orcid_id to find out the openness stats for anyone.

Hit us up with any thoughts or comments, and enjoy!

Why researchers are loving the new Impactstory

We put our heart and soul into the new Impactstory and have been on pins and needles to hear what you think.  Well it’s been a week and the verdict is in — we’re hearing that the new version is awesome, fantastic, and truly excellent, a home run and must-have–an academic profile that’s exciting and relevant.

And so much more. So much more, in fact, that we wanted to a little break from the frenzied responding, bugfixing, and feature-launching we’ve been doing this week and summarize a bit of what we’ve heard.

What do you like?

A lot of users have appreciated that it now takes seconds and is super easy to set up a profile that’s blazing fast and smooth to use: it’s instant insights about your research.

Unlike speed, beauty is in the eye of the beholder–but our beholders seem delightfully agreed that our new look is great, great, great.  Whether users are calling it fresh or beautifully crafted, or sleek or smooth or snazzy, everyone seems to agree that the new version looks awesome, it looks pretty damn awesome. And we are pretty thrilled to hear that.

They’re enjoying that it’s got some fun 🙂 And, we’re not surprised to hear that people like the new price point of Free, making it easier to recommend to others.  

What’s it good for?

Impactstory helps researchers find impacts of their work beyond just citations. People have found mentions they didn’t know about on Wikipedia, discussion in cool blog posts, and reviews on Faculty of 1000. And not just numbers, but impact across the globe. Not just numbers but connecting with people: for instance user Peter van Heusden tweeted, “Using @Impactstory I discovered someone who is consistently promoting work I’m involved in, but who I had no idea existed!”

All this amounts to more than just a lovely ego boost (although it’s that too!). People are telling us that it’s motivating them to adopt more Open Science practices like uploading research slides to a proper repository, getting an ORCID, adding works to their ORCID profile, and celebrating their non-paper publications.

How are you using it?

People are already sending their Impactstory profiles to their funders, and their funders are loving them.  Researchers have added their new profile to their CV, and are planning on using Impactstory data to define innovative ‘pathway to impact’ for UK grants and in tenure and promotion packets.

Folks are including it in workshops.  And even better — building things with our open data! Check out the ferret.io plugin, it rolled out impactstory support this week and it’s really cool 🙂

What have we been doing?

We’ve made a bunch of changes this week in response to your feedback:

  • imports all your publications, not just DOIs.  Everything on your ORCID profile now displays in your Impactstory profile, and we’re working on getting more openness and altmetrics data
  • twitter integration
    • connecting twitter updates your profile pic so you don’t have to fight with gravatar
    • you don’t have to enter email manually–even faster signup
    • we’ll be using your twitter feed for achievements in the future
  • there’s a new Open Sesame achievement
  • we changed the scores at the top of the profile beside your picture; they are now counts of your achievements
  • the achievements and the import process are better documented
  • we rolled out dozens of smaller features, usability enhancements, and bugfixes.

What’s next?

We’re on our way to the FORCE16 conference this week.  We’ll be rolling the feedback from the conference along with your continued feedback into continued improvement to the app.

And you?  Join in with everyone showing off their profile, spread the word (this is how we will grow), and if you don’t have a profile, get one, and tell us what you think!

Finally, thanks.

Finally, we’d like to thank the hundreds of passionate people who have helped us with money and with moral support along the way, from our early days till now. It’s safe to say the new Impactstory is a big hit.  It’s our hit, together.

 

The new Impactstory: Better. Freer.

We are releasing a new version of Impactstory!

https://impactstory.org/u/0000-0001-6728-7745

https://impactstory.org/u/0000-0001-6728-7745

We baked what we’ve learned from hundreds of conversations with researchers into a sleeker, leaner, more useful Impactstory.

Our new Achievements showcase your meaningful accomplishments, not just counts. Our new three-part score helps you track your buzz, engagement, and openness. And next-generation notification emails are improved to tell you what you want to know reliably every week.

And of course we’ve got a slew of other new features as well, including Depsy integration, ORCID sync-on-demand, and full support for mobile.

What’s more, we’re simplifying and streamlining everywhere, eliminating little-used features and doubling down on what users have told us they love. Profile creation is now only via ORCID, we only deal in DOIs, and citation metrics are gone. As a result, creating a profile takes just seconds, our support for diverse research products (preprints, datasets, etc) is bulletproof, and metrics are now consistently clear and up-to-date. Along with a complete code rewrite, these changes make Impactstory faster and more reliable than it’s ever been.

Last but not least, not only are we making Impactstory better: we’re making it cheaper. As in, all the way cheaper. Free!

Why? We heard you love the idea, but not the price–largely because your disciplines or departments aren’t quite ready to use altmetrics for evaluation. We can see this is starting to change, and want to help that change happen as quickly as possible. That means letting as many researchers as possible engage with altmetrics, right now. Free helps that happen.

Alternative sustainability models (like freemium features and new grants) will allow us to continue to build and maintain tools like Impactstory and Depsy to help change how researchers think about understanding and measuring the influence of their work.

Sound good? It is. We think you’ll love it. Go make yourself a profile and see what you learn: https://impactstory.org (and if you’re a current impactstory subscriber check your email for migration details).

We think this new Impactstory the best thing we’ve ever done, and it’s a big step towards creating the open science, altmetrics-powered future we believe in. Thanks building that future with us. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think!

Let’s value the software that powers science: Introducing Depsy

Today we’re proud to officially launch Depsy, an open-source webapp that tracks research software impact.

We made Depsy to solve a problem:  in modern science, research software is often as important as traditional research papers–but it’s not treated that way when it comes to funding and tenure. There, the traditional publish-or-perish, show-me-the-Impact-Factor system still rules.

We need to fix that. We need to provide meaningful incentives for the scientist-developers who make important research software, so that we can keep doing important, software-driven science.

Lots of things have to happen to support this change. Depsy is a shot at making one of those things happen: a system that tracks the impact of software in software-native ways.

That means not just counting up citations to a hastily-written paper about the software, but actual mentions of the software itself in the literature. It means looking how software gets reused by other software, even when it’s not cited at all. And it means understanding the full complexity of software authorship, where one project can involve hundreds of contributors in multiple roles that don’t map to traditional paper authorship.

Ok, this sounds great, but how about some specifics. Check out these examples:

  • GDAL is a geoscience library. Depsy finds this cool NASA-funded ice map paper that mentions GDAL without formally citing it. Also check out key author Even Rouault: the project commit history demonstrates he deserves 27% credit for GDAL, even though he’s overlooked in more traditional credit systems.
  • lubridate improves date handling for R. It’s not highly-cited, but we can see it’s making a different kind of impact: it’s got a very high dependency PageRank, because it’s reused by over 1000 different R projects on GitHub and CRAN.
  • BradleyTerry2 implements a probability technique in R. It’s only directly reused by 8 projects—but Depsy shows that one of those projects is itself highly reused, leading to huge indirect impacts. This indirect reuse gives BradleyTerry2 a very high dependency PageRank score, even though its direct reuse is small, and that makes for a better reflection of real-world impact.
  • Michael Droettboom makes small (under 20%) contributions to other people’s research software, contributions easy to overlook. But the contributions are meaningful, and they’re to high-impact projects, so in Depsy’s transitive credit system he ends up as a highly-ranked contributor. Depsy can help unsung heroes like Micheal get rewarded.
     

Depsy doesn’t do a perfect job of finding citations, tracking dependencies, or crediting authors (see our in-progress paper for more details on limitations). It’s not supposed to. Instead, Depsy is a proof-of-concept to show that we can do them at all. The data and tools are there. We can measure and reward software impact, like we measure and reward the impact of papers.

Embed impact badges in your GitHub README

Given that, it’s not a question of if research software becomes a first-class scientific product, but when and how. Let’s start having the conversations about when and how (here are some great places for that). Let’s improve Depsy, let’s build systems better than Depsy, and let’s (most importantly) start building the cultural and political structures that can use these systems.

For lots more details about Depsy, check out the paper we’re writing (and contribute!), and of course Depsy itself. We’re still in the early stages of this project, and we’re excited to hear your feedback: hit us up on twitter, in the comments below, or in the Hacker News thread about this post.

Depsy is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
edit nov 15 2015: change embed image to match new badge

Farewell to Stacy

We’ve made a lot of happy announcements here on our blog, but today we’re making a sad one: Friday was Stacy’s last day at Impactstory. We’re eliminating our Director of Marketing position, because we need to focus significantly less on marketing and significantly more on finding product-market fit. We’re at a point where we must double down on understanding our users’ needs, and building the product it takes to meet them.

Stacy accomplished amazing things at Impactstory.  Here are just a few:

  • Turned our blog into the top source of information on altmetrics (not just our opinion…we’ve had lots of folks tell us this) for thousands of readers
  • Authored a terrific free e-book on how to raise the profile of scholars’ research
  • Created and ran our successful Advisor program, which is now comprised of researchers and librarians from all over the world
  • Quintupled our followers on Twitter

Stacy is amazing. She’s smart, thorough, engaging, and a terrific combination of idealistic and practical. We’re so proud to have worked beside her.

Impactstory is going to move forward. We’re going to keep learning, keep improving, and we’re ultimately going to transform the world of scholarly communication–thanks in part to the great work that Stacy’s done. That’ll happen. But today, we miss our teammate, and our friend.

 

PS If you want to hire someone awesome, drop Stacy a line at stacykonkiel@fastmail.fm. Drop us a line and we’ll tell you in more detail just how awesome she is.

 

Starting today, Impactstory profiles will cost $5/month. Here’s why that’s a good thing.

Starting today, Impactstory profiles cost $5 per month.

Why? Because our goal has always been for Impactstory to support a second scientific revolution, transforming how academia finds, shares, understands, and rewards research impact. That’s why we’re a nonprofit, and always will be. But (news flash), that transformation is not going to happen overnight. We need a sustainability model that can grow with us, beyond our next year of Sloan and NSF funding. This is that model.

So what does five bucks a month buy you? It buys you the best place in the world to learn and share your scholarly impact. It buys you a profile not built on selling your personal data, or cramming your page with ads, our ability to hustle up more funding, or a hope that Elsevier buys us (nonprofits don’t get acquired).

Five bucks buys you a profile built on a simple premise: we’ll deliver real, practical value to real researchers, every day. And we’ll do it staying a nonprofit that’s fiercely committed to independence, openness, and transparency. Want to fork our app and build a better one? Awesome, here’s all our code. Want access to the data behind your profile? Of course: it’s one click away, in JSON or CSV, as open as we can make it. And that ain’t changing. It’s who we are.

We’ve talked to a lot of users that feel $5/month is a fair deal. Which is great; we agree. But we know some folks may feel differently, and that’s great too. Because if you’re in that second group, we want to hear from you. We’re passionate about building the online profile you do think is worth $5 a month. In fact, we’re doing a huge round of interviews right now…if you’ve got ideas, drop us a line at team@impactstory.org and we’ll schedule a chat. Let’s change the world, together.

New signups will get a 14-day free trial. If you’re a user now, you’ll also get a 14-day trial; plus if you subscribe you’ll get a cool  “Impactstory: Early Adopter” sticker for your laptop. If you’re in a spot where you can’t afford five bucks a month, we understand.  We’ve got a no-questions-asked waiver; just drop us a line showing us how you’re linking to your Impactstory profile in your email signature and we’ll send you a coupon for a free account.

We’re nervous about this change in some ways; it’s not exactly what we’d imagined for Impactstory from the beginning. But we’re confident it’s the right call, and we’re excited about the future. We’re changing the world. And we’re delivering concrete value to users. And we’re not gonna stop.

Is your CV as good as you are?

DlcTBLR.png

When’s the last time you updated your CV?

Adding new papers to a CV is a real pain, and it gets is worse as we start publishing more types of products more often — preprints, code, slides, posters, and so on.  A stale CV reveals an incomplete, dated, less-good version of ourselves — at just the moment when we want to put our best foot forward.

Starting today, Impactstory helps you keep your online identity up to date — we’ve begun automatically finding and adding your new research products to your impact profile, so you don’t have to!

You can now connect your other online accounts to Impactstory in a few seconds. We’ll then watch those accounts; when new products appear there, they’ll automatically show up in your Impactstory profile, too.  Right now you can connect your GitHub, figshare, SlideShare, and ORCID accounts, but that’s just the beginning; we’ll be adding lots more in the coming months. We’re especially excited about adding ways to keep your scholarly articles up-to-date, like Google Scholar does.

Do you want to fill the gaps in your CV with an up-to-date, comprehensive picture of your research and its impact? There’s no better way than with an Impactstory profile. Our signup process is smoother than ever, give it a go!

Top 5 altmetrics trends to watch in 2014

Last year was an exciting one for altmetrics. But it’s history. We were recently asked: what’s 2014 going to look like? So, without further ado, here are our top 5 trends to watch:

Openness: This is just part of a larger trend toward open science–something altmetrics is increasingly (and aptly) identified with. In 2013, it became more clear than ever before that we’re winning the fight for universal OA. Since metrics are qualitatively more valuable when we verify, share, remix, and build on them, we see continued progress toward making both  traditional and novel metrics more open. But closedness still offers quick monetization, and so we’ll see continued tension here.

Acquisitions by the old guard: Last year saw the big players start to move in the altmetrics space, with EBSCO getting Plum Analytics, and Elsevier grabbing Mendeley. In 2014 we’ll likely see more high-profile altmetrics acquisitions, as established megacorps attempt to hedge their bets against industry-destabilizing change.  We’re not against this, per se; it’s a sign that altmetrics are quickly coming of age. But we also think it underscores the importance of having a nonprofit, scientist-run altmetrics provider, too.

More complex modelling: Lots of money got invested in altmetrics in 2013. This year it’ll get spent, largely on improving the descriptive power of altmetrics tools. We’ll see more network-awareness (who tweeted or cited your paper? how authoritative are they?), more context mining (is your work cited from methods or discussion sections?), more visualization (show me a picture of all my impacts this month), more digestion (are there three or four dimensions that can represent my “scientific personality?”), more composite indices (maybe high Mendeley plus low Facebook is likely to be cited later, but high on both not so much). The low-hanging altmetrics fruit–thing like simply counting tweets–are increasingly plucked. In 2014 we’ll see the beginning of what comes next.

Growing interest from administrators and funders: We gave multiple invited talks at the NSF, NIH, and White House this year to folks highly placed in the research funding ecosystem. These leaders are keenly aware of the shortcomings of traditional impact assessment, and eager to supplement it with new data. Administrators too want to tell more meaningful, textured stories about faculty impact. So in 2014, we’ll see several grant, hiring, and T&P guidelines suggest applicants include altmetrics when relevant.

Empowered scientists: But this interest from the scholarly communications superstructure is tricky. Historically, metrics of scholarly impact have often been wielded as technologies of control: reductionist, Taylorist management tools. There’s been concern that more metrics will only tighten this control. That’s not misplaced. But nor is it the only story: we believe 2014 will also see the emergence of the opposite trend. As scientists use tools like Impactstory to gather, analyze, and share their own stories, comprehensive metrics become a way for them to articulate more textured, honest narratives of impact in decisive, authoritative terms. Altmetrics will give scientists growing opportunities to show they’re more than their h-indices.

And there you have it, our top five altmetrics trends for 2014. Are we missing any? Let us know in the comments!

What level of Open Access scholar are you?

Today is a feast for Open Access fans at Impactstory!

Your scholarship is more valuable when it’s available to everyone: free to be widely read, discussed, and used.  Realizing this, funders increasingly mandate that articles be made freely available, and OA journals and repositories make it increasingly easy.

And today at Impactstory, we make it visible!

Where your articles have free fulltext available somewhere online, your Impactstory profile now links straight to it (we’ve found many of these automatically, but you can add links manually, too). Now along with seeing the impacts of your work, folks checking out your profile can read the papers themselves.

But openness is more than just a handy bonus: it’s an essential qualification for a modern scholar. That’s why there’s growing interest in finding good ways to report on scholars’ openness–and it’s why we’re proud to be rolling out new Open Access awards. If 10% of your articles are OA (gold or green), you get an Open Access badge at the top of your profile. For the more dedicated, there are Bronze (30% OA) and Silver (50%) award levels. The elite OA vanguard with over 80% OA articles get the coveted Gold-level award. So…which award did you get? How open are you? Check Impactstory to find out!

To celebrate the launch, we’re giving away this awesome “i ♥ OA” tshirt, featuring the now-classic OA icon and our new logo, to one randomly-drawn Bronze or higher level OA scholar on Monday.

Don’t have a Bronze level award yet? Want to see some more of those “unlocked” icons on your profile?  Great! Just start uploading those preprints to get improve your OA level, and get your chance for that t-shirt. 🙂

Finally, we’ve saved the most exciting Impactstory OA news for last: we’ll also be sending one of these new t-shirts to Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC.  Why? Well, partly because she is and has been one of the OA movement’s most passionate, strategic, and effective leaders. But, more to the point, because we’re absolutely thrilled to be welcoming Heather to Impactstory’s Board of Directors.  Heather joins John Wilbanks on our board, filling the vacancy left by Cameron Neylon as his term ends.  Welcome Heather!

Bringing article fulltext to your Impactstory profile

Your work’s impact helps define your identity as a scientist; that’s why we’re so excited about being the world’s most complete impact profile. But of course the content of your work is a key part of your identity, too.

This week, we’re launching a feature that’ll bring that content to your Impactstory profile: if there’s a free fulltext version of one of your articles, we’ll find it and automatically link to it from your profile.

We’ll be automatically checking tons of places to find where an article’s freely available:

  • Is the article in PMC?
  • Is it published in a journal listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals?
  • Is it published in a journal considered “open access” by Mendeley?
  • Does PubMed LinkOut to a free and full-text resource version?
  • If it’s in none of these, is it in our custom-built list of other open sources (including arXiv, figshare, and others)?

Of course, even with all these checks, we’re going to miss some sources–especially self-archiving in institutional repositories. So we’ll be improving our list over time, and you’ll be able to easily add your own linkouts when we miss them.

We’re excited to pull all this together; it’s another big step toward making your Impactstory profile a great place to share your scholarly identity online. Look for the release in a few days!