2015 kicked off with good news about Nature Publishing Group’s increased commitment towards Open Access, the launch of Frontiers’ research impact social network, Loop, and seven more cool developments in the world of Open Science and altmetrics. Read on!

Nature Publishing Group’s OA journals go CC-BY

Twenty Open Access journals published by Nature Publishing Group recently made the move to offering CC-BY by default. Previously, CC-BY-NC was the default license available for most NPG OA journals, and many authors had to pay higher article processing charges to use a CC-BY license. We applaud this move, which was one of many towards Open Access that NPG made in 2014. For more information, read Claire Calder’s recap of her team’s efforts on the Of Schemes and Memes blog.

How to pay for Gold Open Access fees, even if you’re not well-funded

Self-described “scientific have-not” Zen Faulkes recently blogged about the many strategies he uses to pay for the article processing charges (APCs) his Open Access publications incur.  They include: finding OA journals that waive APCs, petitioning his department chair, and sometimes asking co-authors at other institutions to cover the costs. It’s a great read for anyone concerned about making their work Open Access who lacks grant funding to cover the fees. Read the full list on Dr. Zen’s blog.

Elsevier acquires news monitoring service NewsFlo

Elsevier announced their acquisition of NewsFlo this month. The news monitoring service–which mines over 50,000 news outlets for mentions of research articles–will be integrated into reference management and social bookmarking site Mendeley. This partnership will pave the way for new altmetrics reports for articles and other content added to the platform. Currently, Altmetric.com is the only altmetrics aggregator that reports mainstream media mentions. More information on the acquisition can be found on TechCrunch.

Other open science & research metrics news

• Altmetrics strategy meeting recap available for all to read: In December, altmetrics researchers and organizations from around the world convened at the PLOS headquarters in San Francisco to discuss ways to improve metrics for all. A report of the meeting’s results is now available on Figshare.

• Frontiers launches new research impact social network, Loop: Loop is designed to bring together download and pageview metrics from a variety of publisher and academic websites into a researcher-centered profile. (Currently, these metrics are only sourced from Nature Publishing Group and Frontiers journals.) Researchers can follow each others’ profiles to get updates on new publications, and authors’ research networks (sourced from article co-author lists) can be easily explored. The free service plans to monetize in the future by possibly selling ads or selling its users’ data to advertisers. You can learn more about the service on the Loop website.

• The many ways in which researchers use the scientific literature (hint: it ain’t only about citations): Paleontologist Andy Farke shared how he uses articles in his day-to-day work, and (not surprisingly) “citing in his own papers” isn’t high on the list. Instead, he uses articles to inform his teaching, when reviewing manuscripts, to help prepare him for talking to the public and the media about newly published studies, and more. So why then does academia value citations over the other ways we can measure articles’ use? Read Andy’s full list on his blog.

• Impactstory Advisor of the Month, Chris Chan, on the library’s role in scholcomm innovations: We recently chatted with Chris on his work to bring ORCID to his campus, and what he thinks all librarians should do to foster the adoption of emerging scholarly communication technologies at their universities. Read the full interview on the Impactstory blog.

• New resources available for librarians interested in altmetrics: We recently published two LibGuides (one for researchers and one for librarians) that can help librarians do altmetrics outreach at their university. We’re also now hosting virtual “office hours”, where librarians can message Stacy (our Director of Marketing & Research who’s also an academic librarian) to chat and ask questions about altmetrics and Impactstory. And for those in search of altmetrics professional development opportunities, Library Juice Academy is hosting an altmetrics & bibliometrics course.

• 85% of research data is uncited & only 4-9% have altmetrics: a new study digs deep into citations and altmetrics for research data. Read the full study on Arxiv.

Want updates like these as-they-happen? Follow us on Twitter! In addition to open science and altmetrics news, you can also get Impactstory news–the only altmetrics non-profit.

We’re pleased to announce yet another altmetrics resource for librarians: ready-to-reuse altmetrics LibGuides!

As an academic librarian, I know how hard it can be to find and compile timely, trustworthy resources on a topic like altmetrics. That’s why I’ve created two altmetrics LibGuides, now available for reuse under a CC-BY 4.0 license.

These “Ultimate Guides to Altmetrics” can help researchers and librarians better understand the benefits to (and limitations of) altmetrics. They include:

• Examples of ways that researchers have used altmetrics in their CVs and for tenure and grants

• Up-to-date tutorials on finding citation counts and altmetrics for articles, books, data, software, and more

• Detailed comparisons of Altmetric.com, Impactstory, and PlumX

• Curated videos, handouts, presentations, and other librarian-created altmetrics outreach materials

These are among the most up-to-date, comprehensive altmetrics LibGuides currently available. Check them out, I think you’ll agree:

The Ultimate Guide to Altmetrics (Researcher Edition)

The Ultimate Guide to Altmetrics (Librarian Edition)

Reuse these LibGuides at your own library or pass them along to a colleague. And please do let me know if you have questions or suggestions for improvements (team@impactstory.org).

In this month’s roundup: a university allegedly attempts to hire its way to the top of the rankings, NISO’s altmetrics initiative enters its next phase, and seven other ways December was an interesting month for Open Science and altmetrics. Read on!

An altmetrics-flavored look back at 2014

What were the most popular articles of 2014? Altmetric.com let us know with their year-end roundup, which detailed the 100 most shared and discussed scholarly articles of 2014. At the top of the list was the controversial “emotional contagion” study co-authored by Facebook researchers. See more highlights on the full list, and download the full altmetrics data for the study on Figshare.

Did our altmetrics predictions for 2014 come true? Back in February, we wagered some bets on how the field would evolve throughout 2014, and as expected we got some right and some wrong. Probably our biggest win? That more researchers would become empowered to show the world how they’re winning by using altmetrics. Our biggest miss? Sadly, that altmetrics did not become more “open”.

University criticized for alleged attempts to hire its way to the top of rankings

The Daily Cal reports that staff from King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia recently contacted several University of California professors with opportunities to be hired as “distinguished adjunct professors.” Respected researchers are regularly contacted with job opportunities, but this was different, according to the article:

“KAU offered [Jonathan Eisen] $72,000 per year and free business-class airfare and five-star hotel stays for him to visit KAU in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia…In exchange, Eisen was told he would be expected to work on collaborations with KAU local researchers and also update his Thomson Reuters’ highly cited researcher listing to include a KAU affiliation. He would also be expected to occasionally publish some scientific journal articles with the Saudi university’s name attached.”

Eisen and other scientists interviewed suggest that their high citation rates are at the heart of KAU’s interest, as their affiliation with KAU would boost the university’s international rankings. Read more on The Daily Cal.

NISO votes to create standards for altmetrics

NISO approved Phase 2 of the organization’s altmetrics initiative in December, which will include the creation of standards and recommended practices on the following:

Phase 2 of the project will be to develop standards or recommended practices in the prioritized areas of definitions, calculation methodologies, improvement of data quality, and use of persistent identifiers in alternative metrics. As part of each project, relevant use cases and how they apply to different stakeholder groups will be developed.

This should come as no surprise to those who’ve been following NISO-related altmetrics developments. In September, NISO released results from their community survey, which showed more concern with standards and definitions than issues like gaming.

Want to have a voice in altmetrics standards development? Join any of NISO’s four working groups before 1 Feb., 2015. More information can be found on the NISO website.

We’ll be watching future developments with interest, as any standards and recommended practices developed will affect the way we and other altmetrics aggregators collect, display, and archive altmetrics data in Impactstory profiles.

Other altmetrics & open science news

• ArXiv hits the 1 million paper milestone: Nature News reports that one of the world’s most famous and respected preprint servers, ArXiv, is now home to more than 1 million articles and receives 10 million download requests per month. Incredibly, ArXiv manages to make this treasure-trove of scholarly information freely available to the public at a cost of less than $10 per paper–much less than the reported $50 million per year it takes to operate Science. For an overview of ArXiv’s history, check out Nature News.

• New altmetrics studies confirm that citations don’t correlate with quality (or do they?), OA publications get more downloads & more: Five studies of interest to the altmetrics community were publicized in December. They included a study that shows a lack of correlation between citations and quality (as measured by expert peer review); another, conflicting study that may hold the “secret sauce” formula for turning citations into indicators of quality; a study that found–yet again–that Open Access publications receive more downloads; the results of one conference’s experiment with peer review, which showed that peer review is “close to random” in terms of what reviewers agree to accept and reject; and a paper on “negative links,” which may have future applications for context-aware altmetrics.

• Meet Open Science champion and Impactstory Advisor Dr. Lorena Barba: We recently interviewed Lorena to learn more about her lab’s Open Science manifesto, her research in computational methods in aeronautics and biophysics, and George Washington University’s first Massive Open Online Course, “Practical Numerical Methods with Python”. To read more about her work, visit the Impactstory blog.

• Altmetrics can help measure attention and influence for education-oriented journal articles: PLOS Computational Biology recently shared a thoughtful perspective on an editorial titled, “An Online Bioinformatics Curriculum.” To look at citations to the 2012 paper, you’d think it wasn’t a success–but you’d be wrong. PLOS’s article-level metrics show that the editorial has been viewed over 77,000 times, bookmarked more than 300 times, and has received a great deal of attention on social media. It’s just one more example of ways in which altmetrics can measure attention and influence of scholarship beyond those traditionally valued.

• Nature takes a lot of heat for its experiment in free-to-access–but not Open Access–journal articles: Nature Publishing Group announced its intent to offer free access to articles in many of its journals over the next year. The plan allows those with subscription access to an article to generate a link that will allow others to read the article for free–but not download or copy the article’s content. Many scientists criticized the move, pointing out the many restrictions that are placed on content shared. We also shared our concerns, particularly with respect to the negative effects the program could have on altmetrics. But many scientists also lauded Nature’s experiment, and shared their appreciation for NPG’s attempt to make content more accessible. To learn more, check out Timo Hannay’s blog and John Wilbank’s thoughts on “Nature’s Shareware Moment.”

• Impactstory’s “30-Day Impact Challenge” released as an ebook: To download a free copy of our new ebook based on the popular November Impact Challenge, visit our blog. You can also purchase a copy for your Kindle.

Want updates like these delivered to your inbox weekly? Sign up for our open science & altmetrics newsletter! In addition to open science and altmetrics news, you can also get news from us here at Impactstory, the only altmetrics non-profit.

Over the next two months, we’re experimenting with providing increased support to librarians, many of whom are their on-campus resource for all-things-altmetrics.

If you’re a librarian with questions about Impactstory, altmetrics, or just about anything else related to measuring and demonstrating impact, you can message Stacy on Skype during the following times:

• 7 pm to 9 pm on Mondays (Mountain time here in the US; better for folks east of the Central European Time zone–India, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand)

• 9 am to 12 pm on Fridays (Mountain time here in the US; better for folks west of CET–USA, Western & Central Europe)

To confirm when Stacy will be online in your time zone, we recommend checking out EveryTimeZone.com.

To connect with Stacy, open Skype and go to the Contacts drop-down menu, select “Add contact,” search for Stacy by her name or username (stacy.konkiel), then click the green “Add contact” button. Please include a short note about who you are and why you want to chat when sending the invitation to connect, as it helps keeps the spammers away.

Stacy will be keeping these office hours starting Monday, January 12 through March 20, 2015. Talk to you soon!

Back in August, we started sharing our outreach and growth statistics, warts and all. That’s because we’re committed to radical transparency, and had a hunch that our users–who are interested in quantitative measures of impact–would be curious to see the numbers.

After using this format to share our stats for five months, we’ve decided to move away from blogging them in favor of a centralized, easier to read format: a simple Google Spreadsheet, open to all.

Below, we share our numbers in blog format for the final time, and provide a link to the Google Spreadsheet where we’ll share our stats from here on out.

Here are our outreach numbers for December 2014*.

impactstory.org traffic

• Visitors: 3,504 total; 2,189 unique
• New Users: 195
• Conversion rate: 8.9% (% of visitors who signed up for a trial account)

Blog stats

• Unique visitors: 6,911
• Clickthrough rate: 0.8% (% of people who visited Impactstory.org from the blog)
• Conversion rate: 17.5% (% of visitors to Impactstory.org from blog who then signed up for a trial Impactstory account)
• Percent of new user signups: 5.1%

Twitter stats

• New followers  262
• Increase in followers from November 5.3%
• Mentions 173 (We’re tracking this to answer the question, “How engaged are our followers?”)
• Tweet reach ~398,800 (We’re tracking this–the number of people who potentially saw a tweet mentioning Impactstory or our blog–to understand our brand awareness)
• Clickthroughs: 131
• Conversions: 14

What does it all mean?

We’re seeing a familiar, seasonal dip in traffic for our blog, Twitter, and impactstory.org as the semester winds down and researchers take leave from the lab to celebrate the holidays. However, impactstory.org traffic is up 25% from the same period last year, our Twitter followers more than doubled since late January, and we’ve seen a steady growth in traffic to our blog over the past twelve months.

We’re pleased with our growth to date, and look forward to sharing our future growth here.

Thanks for joining us in this experiment in radical transparency! And Happy New Year!

* These numbers were recorded at 10 am MDT on Dec. 31st, 2014.

In this month’s roundup: OpenCon 2014, “the crappy Gabor paper” snafu, sexier scientific graphics and 7 other ways November was a big month for Open Science and altmetrics. Read on!

“Generation Open” organizes itself at OpenCon 2014

An international group of students and early career researchers met at the first annual OpenCon meeting in Washington DC. While we couldn’t attend in person, we followed the conference via Twitter and livestream, as did many others from around the world. It was excellent.

Among the participants were Patrick Brown (PLOS), Victoria Stodden (Stanford), Erin McKiernan (Wilfrid Laurier University), and Pete Binfield (PeerJ), all of whom shared two important messages with the attendees: 1) even as a junior scientist, you can make choices that support open access, but 2) don’t feel bad if you’re not yet an OA revolutionary–it’s the responsibility of more senior scientists to help pave the way and align your career incentives with the OA movement’s aims.

You can read a great summary of OpenCon on the Absolutely Maybe blog, and watch OpenCon sessions for yourself on YouTube.

“The crappy Gabor paper” citation snafu

A recently published journal article gained some unwanted attention in November thanks to a copyediting error: the authors’ note-to-self to cite “the crappy Gabor paper” was left in the version of the article that made it to press, which someone found and shared on Twitter.

Because of the increased social media attention the article received, its altmetrics shot through the roof, causing cynics to point out that altmetrics must be flawed because they’re measuring the attention a paper received not for its quality but instead for a silly citation mistake.

We have a different perspective. Altmetrics aggregators like Altmetric.com are useful precisely because they can capture and share data about this silly mistake. After all, we expose the underlying, qualitative data that shows exactly what people are saying when they mention a paper:

That exposure is crucial to allowing viewers to better understand why a paper’s been mentioned. Compare that to how traditional citation indices tend to compile citation numbers of a paper: simple numbers, zero context.

Towards sustainable software at WSSSPE2

The 2nd Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2) met in New Orleans to discuss what barriers exist to the long-term sustainability of code. Turns out, there are many, and they’re mostly rooted in a lack of proper incentives for software creators.

Among the many interesting papers presented at the meeting were:

• Marian Petre and Greg Wilson. Code Review For and By Scientists
• Neil Chue Hong. Minimal information for reusable scientific software
• James Howison. Retract bit-rotten publications: Aligning incentives for sustaining scientific software
• Daniel S. Katz and Arfon M. Smith. Implementing Transitive Credit with JSON-LD

Links to all conference papers and detailed notes from the meeting can be found on the WSSSPE2 website.

Other altmetrics & open science news

• Are you a science blogger? Paige needs you! Paige Brown Jarreau (also known as Twitter’s @fromthelabbench) is studying science blogging practices for her PhD research. Respond to her “Survey for Science Bloggers” here.

• Major UK research funder describes how they use altmetrics to gauge public engagement for the studies they fund: the Wellcome Trust recently published an article in PLOS Biology that outlines how the group uses altmetrics to learn about the societal impacts of the work they support. They also suggest that altmetrics may play an important role in research evaluation in the years to come. Read the full article here.

• Meet Impactstory’s Advisor of the Month, Open Access superadvocate Keita Bando:  We chatted with Keita about his work founding MyOpenArchive, a precursor to Figshare. Keita also shared his perspective on librarians’ role in helping scientists navigate the often-complicated options they have for practicing Open Science, and gave us a look at his app that makes it much easier for researchers to sync their Mendeley and ORCID profiles. Read the full interview here on the Impactstory blog.

• How a rip-off website is polluting Google Scholar profiles with spam citations: the Retraction Watch blog reports that a website created to illegally resell content to Chinese academics is inadvertently adding fake publications to some scientists’ Google Scholar profiles. Individual scholars can remove spam citations from their profiles themselves. Read more on Retraction Watch.

• You can now batch upload publications to your ORCID profile: researcher identification service ORCID is great at finding your publications and other scholarly outputs automatically, but sometimes you need to add content manually. Luckily, ORCID just added a BibTeX import option, meaning you can upload many documents at once using a file that’s easily exported from Mendeley, ADS, and many other reference management applications.

• Standards for scientific graphics from 1914 could make modern Open Science better: Jure Triglav recaps some important reports from the early 1900’s that have largely been forgotten to date. In them, some of science’s brightest minds set rules for creating scientific graphics, including no-brainers like, “Display the data alongside the graph”–which for some reason we don’t regularly practice today. Triglav also offers a proof-of-concept for how open data can be used to create better, more informative graphics in the modern era. Read the full article here.

• Older articles more likely to be cited, now that they’re increasingly online: Google Scholar reports that there’s been a 28% growth in citations to older articles between 1990 and 2013 due to their increased availability online. It’s a great argument for “opening up” your older scholarship, isn’t it?

What was your favorite open science or altmetrics happening from November?

Ours was probably the Impactstory November Impact Challenge, but we couldn’t fit it into this roundup! (See what we did there?) Share your favorite news in the comments below.