Author: Heather

Tell the NIH that grant biosketches need impact info

The NIH wants to hear your thoughts on how it should modify its biosketch requirements. Feedback due Friday JUNE 29th 2012, midnight EDT.

The request for information is wide open, but specifically requests feedback on the idea that a researcher’s biosketch could “include a short explanation of their most important scientific contributions.”  

Sounds like a chance for scientists to tell their impact story!  Good idea? And do you think impact stories should include impact metrics?  If so, tell the NIH!

Right now the NIH biosketch instructions only include impact signalling through journal titles.  

Some ideas for new biosketch instructions:

  1. explicitly encourage all types of research output as publications, including software and datasets
  2. explicitly welcome indications of impact, like citations, downloads and bookmarking counts
  3. consider identifying articles only by authors, title, and ID/url rather than journal

Add your voice:  here’s the form.  We understand that the group receiving these responses is empowered to make changes.

(ht to Rebecca Rosen.  More info at ResearchRemix.  CC0.)

total-impact All The Time and IRL

Heather is going to be full-time total-impact starting August 1st!

For the last two years I have been a DataONE postdoc, with discretionary time for synergistic activities like total-impact.  I went officially 50/50 when the Sloan grant started May 1st…. and have now revised that plan to be 100% total-impact starting in six weeks.  

My passion for data remains. This move is because I believe research data needs better tracking tools to be fully appreciated and useful.  It needs context.  Context around how a dataset is collected, but also context around how the dataset is received by the community and what difference it has made.  As part of our commitment to diverse research products, total-impact collects metrics on dataset discussion and reuse and makes these tracks broadly available for mashups and remixes.  We’ll be doing much more of this in the coming months.

(I would talk about how great it has been to be a DataONE postdoc, but this isn’t a goodbye post — I still have papers to finish! 🙂 )

In related and similarly-awesome news, Jason is relocating to Vancouver for August and September, for total-impact All The Time and IRL 2012.  There will be t-shirts.


ti out and about

These are exciting days in total-impact land:

  • We’re participating (and speaking!) in StartUp Science this weekend. Check out the lineup: PeerJ! Mendeley! Academia.edu! ScienceExchange! total-Impact! OAMonday! and more. Ambitious innovative research tools are going to be game-changing for the way scientists work.
  • altmetrics12 is next week! Jason has been one of the main movers and shakers in pulling together a stellar attendee group: publishers, funders, tool-builders, researchers. Follow along at #altmetrics12.
  • we can barely sleep at night due to excitement about our new codebase… stay tuned or spy on our commits for teasers.


Keeping metrics free

Sustainability is important for the kind of infrastructure we want to build with total-impact. The obvious way to do this is to pass along our costs to folks who want to use the metrics, and we’ve discussed ways to do this.

However, over the last week, we’ve reached an important decision: in addition to keeping our source code and planning process open, we’ll keep our metrics free and open, too. We won’t charge for access or use.

This may seems quixotic, but it’s not motivated by blind “information wants to be free” fanpersonism. Rather, it’s motivated by our underlying goal for this project: not just a nifty new way to measure impact (although it’s that, too), but rather the base for a fundamentally transformed, web-native scholarly communication system. 

The value in selling altmetrics is dwarfed by the value of what we can build using them. And we can only build these systems if the metrics themselves can flow like water between and among evaluators, readers, recommendation engines, authors, and all the other cogs of this scholarly communication system. 

We’re both believers in The Market. There’s lots of money to be made in the coming post-journal world; we support those folks trying to make it. But we see that the market is not going to provide the kind of infrastructure that the next generation of recommendation and tools will need.

So over the next few months, we’ll be forming a non-profit foundation, and continuing to pursue philanthropic funding through at least the next year (while still looking at innovative ways to develop additional revenue streams). The Sloan Foundation have seen the value in what we’re doing; we think that Sloan and others will be excited to continue supporting the vision of a comprehensive, timely, free, and open metrics infrastructure. 

We scholars have travelled the route of trusting our basic decision-making infrastructure to a for-profit before. Despite everyone’s best intentions, it’s not worked out so well. We’re excited about helping to start a new era of metrics along a different course.

Open impact metrics need #openaccess. Please sign.

Something exciting is going on.  A petition for increased access to the scientific literature is gathering steam.  If it gets 25k signatures in 30 days — and it looks like it will get many more — the proposal will go to Obama’s desk for integration into policy.

Total-Impact urges you to sign this petition and share it with others.  We have 🙂

Improved access to the research literature is *essential* if we want innovative systems to track the impact of scholarly research products within the scholarly ecosystem.  

As far as we know, there is only one cross-publisher open computer-accessible source for citations: PubMed Central. And the only cross-publisher search of full text that can be reused by computer programs? Comes from PubMed Central.  PubMed Central is awesome, but it only has NIH-funded biomedical literature. Scholarship needs these resources for all research literature.  This petition is an important step.

Please go sign the petition and spread the word.  #altmetrics #OAMonday #openaccess #theFutureIsComing

Durham Smoffice application

Thanks to Alert Community Member Hilmar Lapp, we found out about a contest for startups to win the World’s Smallest Office (smoffice, get it?): basically a nook in a coffee shop. Rather more enticingly, it also comes with six months of a condo in downtown Durham, which has a growing startup scene.

Jason lives and goes to school near Durham, and plus we like the kind of wacky thinking that comes up with this sort of contest so we applied.  Here’s the one-minute smoffice video, in which I sell TI from inside a boiler room, dryer, car trunk, and my fridge. 

Here’s the one-page business plan we submitted—bear in mind that in keeping with our agile approach, this is a business plan, but not the business plan. It’s certain to change, maybe quite radially, as we continue to adapt in response to user feedback and our own evolving ideas.

We find out on the 13th. Feel free to vote up our video on the smoffice Facebook page if you’re into that sort of thing.

total-impact awarded $125k Sloan grant!

We just heard: total-impact has been awarded $125k by the Sloan Foundation! What’s this mean for users?  By April 1, 2013, we plan to hit important milestones in three areas:

Product:

  • addition of over a dozen new information sources to total-impact.org, particularly data repositories
  • 60 github watchers, 20 forks
  • substantial innovation in user interfaces for and visualizations of altmetric data

Use:

  • 50k visits to total-impact.org, 30k unique visitors
  • at least 100 scholars embedding or linking to TI reports on their CV
  • at least 25 TI reports included in annual review or tenure & promotion packages
  • 15 publishers/repositories embedding total-impact data on articles/datasets
  • 5 in-process or published research studies based on TI data

Sustainability: A sustainable business plan and organizational model for a mission‐driven TI organization

For more detail, see the grant proposal.

We are so excited! Thanks to Josh Greenberg, program director.  You won’t regret it 🙂 As always, let us know if you’ve got thoughts or ideas on how we can best make these goals happen. Now let’s go change the world!

follow along as we rearchitect

Total-impact has outgrown its baby teeth: we are rearchitecting the codebase.  The goal is a robust and scaleable framework that will take us through the next phase of rapid growth.

The new codebase will have a clean api, a webapp that uses the api directly, data storage at the item level, a history of metric values over time, and queues to facilitate timeliness and scalability.  It is being built from the ground up with good logging, error-handling, and documentation… aspects that aren’t always at the top of the hackathon agenda 🙂

The new codebase is written in Python rather than PHP.  This change wasn’t taken lightly: changing programming languages is a Classic Blunder after all.  That said, others have done it successfully, and Python appears to be the favourite programming language at Hacker News, so we’re confident it is the right move.

Without further ado, here are the new code repositories at GitHub.  Works in progress… stay tuned!

agile meets distributed open source development

Total-impact will always be open-source.  It is a pretty standard OSS project in its early stages: its core developers are geographically distributed and contributions have been fueled by enthusiasm rather than paycheques.  Producing Open Source Software gives a great overview of standard processes for these sorts of projects.

At the same time, Jason and I (Heather) are sold on the principles behind agile development: iteration, adaptation, tight feedback loops, simplicity.

OSS and agile methodologies have many similarities, but some differences.  In particular, agile development is practiced most often by co-located, dedicated-coding teams.  As a result, we’ve been rolling our own process a bit.  It is working well: it feels good, we aren’t spending too much time on process, and we recognize and change things when they aren’t working.

For example: we were keeping our sprint backlog in a google spreadsheet. Last sprint we moved to tracking sprint items as GitHub issues.  Although this makes it harder to do time estimation, it is easier to integrate into our workflows… currently a win.

Here is what our development process looks like right now:

  • two-week sprints.  We practice a little more flexibility in pre-determined scope than Scrum agile.
  • developer conversation take place openly on the newly-formed total-impact-dev google group
  • weekly Skype calls with active developers (Richard, Mark, Heather, Jason) for start/mid/end sprint conversations
  • sprint issues in GitHub
  • product backlog in a google spreadsheet
A few things are lacking: good ways to get customer feedback is a main one! We’ll get there soon.
Sound fun?  It is 🙂  Join us!

latest Sloan grant revision

We’ve submitted a revision to our Sloan Foundation grant in response to comments and feedback from them, and to reflect some updated ideas we’ve had.

The biggest change is the budget. I’m close to full-time already because TI is my dissertation. But we’ve boosted Heather’s grant salary to the point where she’d only be 50% supported by her current postdoc, with the other half by the TI grant.

(Update: we received the grant! Read all about it here.)