We’re pleased to announce the August Impactstory Advisor of the Month, Megan O’Donnell!

As a Scholarly Communication Librarian at Iowa State University, Megan’s a campus expert on altmetrics and Open Science. Since joining the Advisors program, Megan has educated other campus librarians on altmetrics and Impactstory, and is currently hard at work planning an “intro to altmetrics” faculty workshop for the Fall semester.

We recently chatted with Megan about her job as a Scholarly Communication Librarian, how Impactstory benefits her scholarly activities, and how the new Impactstory subscription model has affected her outreach efforts.

Why did you initially decide to join Impactstory?

I’m still a new librarian in many ways. I just passed my 1 year anniversary as a full-time librarian this spring and my coauthors and I are finishing up what will be my first peer-reviewed work. Impactstory appealed to me because it was a way to showcase and track the work I have been doing outside of traditional publications. Without Impactstory I would never have known that one of my slideshows is considered “highly viewed” and continues to be viewed every week.

Why did you decide to become an Advisor?

A coworker suggested it to me. At first I was uncertain and I found myself thinking “But my profile is so empty! I haven’t ‘published’ anything yet! This won’t work.” In the end I decided that it was an important thing to do as a campus advocate for open access and altmetrics. There are many people who will be in the same position as me, wondering if Impactstory is worth it when they have so little to showcase. All I can say is that I can’t wait to fill my Impactstory profile up.

How have you been spreading the word about Impactstory in your first two months as an Advisor?

There’s not a lot of activity on campus during the summer. Most of our students are gone and many researchers and faculty are away on vacation, field work, or attending conferences so the majority of my time has been spent planning for an altmetrics workshop for fall. The one thing I did do this summer was to set up the chair of one of my departments with a profile. Impactstory provided a nice way to way to start a conversation about faculty and department work that tends to be left out by traditional metrics (such as the materials that her department produces for ISU’s extension program). I don’t think she’s completely convinced about the value of altmetrics, but she was open to creating an account to see what it could do and now she’s aware that there are other tools and measurements.

Once I got my Advisor package I visited other librarians in my department. We have a mix of faculty and academic professionals but everyone, no matter their rank, wanted one of the “I am more than my H-Index” stickers. I ran out within a week. The slogan speaks to everyone: no one wants to be judged solely on their citation numbers.

How has Impactstory’s new subscription model impacted your work as an Advisor?

A couple of my coworkers asked me about the change since I’m an Advisor. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and how it changed my feelings about Impactstory. After the initial knee-jerk reaction to having something “taken away”, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an acceptable change. The Paperpile blog post has already outlined many of the possible benefits, so I won’t repeat them here. The bottom line is I feel that I can recommend Impactstory because there’s nothing else like it.

Tell us about the workshops you’re planning on Impactstory for the Fall semester.

Iowa State University only began to having conversations around open access with the launch of our institutional repository, Digital Repository @ Iowa State University, in 2012. While the University Library has been very proactive in providing support with helping faculty prepare for promotion and tenure cases, much of it has revolved around those dreaded numbers: citations, Journal Impact Factor and the H-Index. The workshop I am designing will be an introduction to altmetrics with hands-on activities. It will likely end with having all participants create a trial Impactstory account that way they get an altmetrics experience tailored just for them.

What’s the best part about your work as a Scholarly Communication Librarian for the Iowa State University?

There are huge opportunities on this campus. If you’ve looked at my profile you’ll see that most of my recent work has been on data management planning. That really took off. We got support from the Office of the Vice President of Research, which is also sponsoring a panel discussion planned for Open Access Week, and from other campus units. Everyone is excited about the future of scholarly communications at Iowa State.

What advice would you give other librarians who want to do outreach on altmetrics to their colleagues and faculty?

I think it’s important to frame discussion about altmetrics as part of a larger picture. For example, NSF research grant proposals are judged on something called “broader impacts” which, in brief is “the potential of the proposed activity to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes” (NSF Proposal Preparation Instructions). Altmetrics could give us some insight into if a grant has met its broader impact goals. How many views did the grant funded video receive? Was it picked up by a news outlet? Does anyone listen to the podcast? These types of activities are not captured any other way but they are important. Altmetrics can show the reach of research beyond the academy which is becoming increasingly important as research dollars are spread thinner and thinner.

Thanks, Megan!

As a token of our appreciation for Megan’s hard work, we’re sending her an Impactstory t-shirt of her choice from our Zazzle store.

Megan is just one part of a growing community of Impactstory Advisors. Want to join the ranks of some of the Web’s most cutting-edge researchers and librarians? Apply to be an Advisor today!

Meet our Advisor of the Month for July, Keith Bradnam! Keith is an Associate Project Scientist with the Korf Lab at UC Davis and active science communicator (read his blog, ACGT, and follow him on Twitter at @kbradnam).

Why is Keith our Advisor of the Month? Because he shared his strategies for success as a scientist at a well-attended Impactstory info session he organized at UC Davis earlier this month. Plus, he’s helping us to improve Impactstory every day, submitting bug reports and ideas for new features on our Feedback forum.

We recently emailed Keith to learn more about why he decided to become an Advisor, what made his recent workshop so great, and his thoughts on using blogging to become a more successful scientist.

Why did you initially decide to join Impactstory?

When I first heard about Impactstory, it just seemed like such an incredibly intuitive and useful concept. Publications should not be seen as the only form of scientific ‘output’, and having a simple way to gather together the different aspects of my academic life seemed like such a no-brainer.

In the past, I have worked in positions where I helped develop database resources for other scientists. These type of non-research positions, often only provide an opportunity for one formal publication a year (e.g. a paper in the annual Nucleic Acids Research ‘Database’ issue). This is a really poor reflection of the contributions that many bioinformaticians (and web programmers, database administrators etc.) make to the wider scientific community. In the past we didn’t have tools like GitHub to easily show the world what software we were helping develop.

Why did you decide to become an Advisor?

Impactstory is a great service and the more people that get to know about it and use it, the better it will become. I want to be part of that process, particularly because I still think that there are many people who are stuck in the mindset that a CV or résumé is the only way to list what you have done in your career.

I’m really hopeful that tools like Impactstory will forever change how people assess the academic achievements of others.

How have you been spreading the word about Impactstory in your first month as an Advisor?

I’ve mainly been passing on useful tweets from the @Impactstory Twitter account and keeping an eye on the Impactstory Feedback Forums where I’ve been adding some suggestions of my own and replying to questions from others. Beyond that, I’ve evangelized about Impactstory to my lab, and I gave a talk on campus to Grad students and Postdocs earlier this month.

How did your workshop go?

Well perhaps I’m biased 🙂 but I think it was well-received. There was a good mix of Grad students, Postdocs, and some other staff, and I think people were very receptive to hearing about the ways that Impactstory could be beneficial to them. They also asked lots of pertinent questions which has led to some new feature requests for the Impactstory team to consider. [You can view a video of Keith’s presentation over at his blog.]

You run a great blog about bioinformatics–ACGT. Why do you blog, and would you recommend it to others?

Blogging is such an incredibly easy way to share useful information to your peers. Sometimes that information can be succinct, factual material (these are the steps that I took to install software ‘X’), sometimes it can be opinion or commentary (this is why I think software ‘X’ will change the world), and sometimes it can just be entertainment or fun (how I used software ‘X’ to propose to my wife).

I think we’re currently in a transition period where people no longer see ‘blogging’ as being an overly geeky activity. Instead, I think that many people now appreciate that blogging is just a simple tool for quickly disseminating information.

I particularly recommend blogging to scientists. Having trouble following a scientific protocol and need some help? Blog about it. Think you have made an improvement on an existing protocol? Blog about it. Have some interesting thoughts about a cool paper that you have just read? Blog about it. There are a million and one topics that will never be suitable for a formal peer-reviewed publication, but which would make fantastic ideas for a blog post.

Blogging may be beneficial for your career by increasing your visibility amongst your peers, but more importantly I think it really improves your writing skills and — depending on what you blog about — you are giving something back to the community.

What’s the best part about your current gig as an Associate Project Scientist with the Korf Lab at UC Davis?

I think that most people would agree that if you work on a campus where you get to walk past a herd of cows every day, then that’s pretty hard to beat! However the best part of my job is that I get to spend time mentoring others in the lab (students, not cows), and I like to think that I’m helping them become better scientists, and better communicators of science in particular.

Thanks, Keith!

As a token of our appreciation for Keith’s hard work, we’re sending him an Impactstory t-shirt of his choice from our Zazzle store.

Keith is just one part of a growing community of Impactstory Advisors. Want to join the ranks of some of the Web’s most cutting-edge researchers and librarians? Apply to be an Advisor today!

Don’t have time to stay on top of the most important Open Science and Altmetrics news? We’ve gathered the very best of the month in this post. Read on!

UK researchers speak out on assessment metrics

There are few issues more polarizing in academia right now than research assessment metrics. A few months back, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) asked researchers to submit their evidence and views on the issue, and to date many well-reasoned responses have been shared.

Some of the highlights include Ernesto Priego’s thoughtful look at the evidence for and against; this forceful critique of the practice, penned by Sabaratnam and Kirby; a call to accept free market forces “into the internal dynamics of academic knowledge production” by Steve Fuller; and this post by Stephen Curry, who shares his thoughts as a member of the review’s steering group.

Also worth a look is Digital Science’s “Evidence for excellence: has the signal overtaken the substance?”, which studies the unintended effects that past UK assessment initiatives have had on researchers’ publishing habits.

Though the HEFCE’s recommendations will mainly affect UK researchers, the steering group’s findings may set a precedent for academics worldwide.

Altmetrics researchers agree: we know how many, now we need to know why

Researchers gathered in Bloomington, Indiana on June 23 to share cutting-edge bibliometrics and altmetrics research at the ACM WebScience Altmetrics14 workshop.

Some of the highlights include a new study that finds that only 6% of articles that appear in Brazilian journals have 1 or more altmetrics (compared with ~20% of articles published in the “global North”); findings that use of Twitter to share scholarly articles grew by more than 90% from 2012 to 2013; a study that found that most sharing of research articles on Twitter occurs in original tweets, not retweets; and a discovery that more biomedical and “layman” terms appear in the titles of research shared on social media than in titles of highly-cited research articles.

Throughout the day, presenters repeatedly emphasized one point: high-quality qualitative research is now needed to understand what motivates individuals to share, bookmark, recommend, and cite research outputs. In other words, we increasingly know how many altmetrics research outputs tend to accumulate and what those metrics’ correlations are–now we need to know why research is shared on the social Web in the first place, and how those motivations influence various flavors of impact.

Librarians promoting altmetrics like never before

This month’s Impactstory blog post, “4 things every librarian should do with altmetrics,” has generated a lot of buzz and some great feedback from the library community. But it’s just one part of a month filled with librarians doin’ altmetrics!

To start with, College & Research Libraries News named altmetrics a research library trend for 2014, and based on just the explosion of librarian-created presentations on altmetrics in the last 30 days alone, we’re inclined to agree! Plus, there were librarians repping altmetrics at AAUP’s Annual Meeting and the American Library Association Annual Meeting (here and here), and the Special Libraries Association Annual Meeting featured our co-founder, Heather Piwowar, in two great sessions and Impactstory board member, John Wilbanks, as the keynote speaker.

More Open Science & Altmetrics news

• NIH makes a major change to the biosketch format: now, applicants will be asked to list their accomplishments instead of their publications in their NIH biosketches. As you can see from the blog post’s comments, some researchers are up in arms. But supporters of the change point out that it moves science away from defining success using a very narrow format, the journal article.
• Your input is needed on NISO’s altmetrics recommended practices: the standards-setting organization NISO has requested comments on a number of action items and recommended practices related to altmetrics. Their final report will likely have consequences for how publishers, universities, and scholars access and use altmetrics. Interested? You can submit your feedback through July 18, 2014.
• Altmetrics companies Plum Analytics and Altmetrics roll out great new features: in June, Plum Analytics rolled out a new data visualization for their platform, PlumX, called the Plum Print, became the first altmetrics company to add download and pageview count information from library database vendor EBSCO, and teamed up with research foundation Autism Speaks to share “powerful and actionable information about the research they fund.” And the fine folks at Altmetric released their institutional edition and added a crucial new metric to their reports: citations in policy documents. Congrats, guys!
• You can now export Impactstory metrics directly to your CV: not long after we published our thoughts on why you should put altmetrics on your CV, post-doc and Impactstory Advisor Guillaume Lobet created an Impactstory CV generator. Provide your Impactstory handle and his tool exports your CV in HTML, PDF, LaTeX, or Markdown format. Check it out now!
• Save the date for Europe’s first altmetrics conference: 1am: London will be held September 25-26 at the Wellcome Trust’s offices in London, and (based on the rumors we’ve heard about the lineup) is shaping up to be great! For more information as it is released, watch altmetricsconference.com.

Stay connected

We share altmetrics and Open Science news as-it-happens on our Twitter, Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn pages. And if you don’t want to miss next month’s news roundup, remember that you can sign up to get these posts and other Impactstory news delivered straight to your inbox.

Jon Tennant (blog – Twitter), a PhD candidate studying tetrapod biodiversity and extinction at Imperial College London, was one of the first scientists to join our recently launched Advisor program.

Within minutes of receiving his acceptance into the program, Jon was pounding the virtual pavement to let others know about Impactstory and the benefits it brings to scientists. For this reason–and the fact that Jon has done some cool stuff in addition to his research, like write a children’s book!–Jon’s our first Impactstory Advisor of the Month.

We chatted with Jon to learn more about how he uses Impactstory, what it’s like being an Advisor, and what he’s doing in other areas of his professional life.

Why did you initially decide to create an Impactstory profile?

A couple of years ago, I immersed myself into social media and the whole concept of ‘Web 2.0’. It was clear that the internet was capable of changing many aspects of the way in which we practice, communicate, and assess scientific research. There were so many tools though, and so much diversity, it was all a bit daunting, especially as someone so junior in their career. Although I guess that’s one of the advantages of being at this stage – I wasn’t tied down to any particular way of ‘doing science’ yet, and free to experiment.

Having followed the discussions on alternative and article-level metrics, when ImpactStory was released it seemed like a tool that could really make a difference for myself and the broader research community. At the time, it made no sense to me how the outputs of research were assessed – the name or the impact factor of a journal was given far too much meaning, and did nothing to really encapsulate the diversity of ways in which quality or impact, or putative pathways to impact, could be measured. ImpactStory seemed to offer a decent alternative, and hey look – it does! Actually, it’s not an alternative, but complementary tool for a range of methods in assessing how research is used.

Why did you decide to become an Advisor?

Pretty much for the reasons above! One thing I’m learning as a young scientist is that it’s easy to be part of an echo chamber on social media, advocating altmetrics and all the jazzy new aspects of research, but many scientists aren’t online. Getting those people involved in conversations, and alerting them to cool new tools is made a lot easier as an Advisor.

I reckon this type of community engagement is pretty important, especially in what appears to be such a crucial transitional phase for researchers, including things like open access and data, and the way in which research is assessed (e.g., through the REF here in the UK). ImpactStory obviously has a role in making this much easier for academics.

How have you been spreading the word about Impactstory in your first month as an Advisor?

Mostly sharing stickers! They actually work really well in getting people’s attention. They’re even more doubly useful when people ask things like “What’s a h-index”, so you can actually use them as a basis for further discussion. But yeah, I don’t really go out of my way to preach to people about altmetrics and ImpactStory – academics really don’t like being told what they should be doing and things, especially at my university. I prefer to kind of hang back, wait for discussions, and inject that things like altmetrics exist, and could be really useful when combined with things like a social media presence, or an ORCID, and that they are one of an integrated set of tools that can be really useful for assessing how your research is being used, as well as a kind of personal tracking device. I’d love to hold an ImpactStory/altmetrics Q and A or workshop at some point in the future.

You just wrote a children’s book about dinosaurs–tell us about it!

Let it be known that you brought this up, not me 😉

So, pretty much just by having a social media presence (mostly through blogging), I was asked to write a book on kids dinosaurs! Of course I said yes, and along with a talented artist, we created a book with pop-out dinosaurs that you can reconstruct into your very own little models! You can pre-order it here.* I think it’s out in October in the UK and USA. Is there an ImpactStory bit for that…? [ed: Not yet! Perhaps add it as a feature request on our Feedback forum? :)]

* (I don’t get royalties, so it’s not as bad promoting it…)

What’s the best part about your current gig as a PhD student at Imperial College London?

The freedom. I have an excellent supervisor who is happy to let me blog, tweet, attend science communication conferences and a whole range of activities that are complimentary to my PhD, as long as the research gets done. So there’s a real diversity of things to do, and being in London there’s always something science-related going on, and there’s a great community vibe too, with people who work within the broader scope of science always coming together and interacting. Of course, the research itself is amazing – I work with a completely open database called the Palaeobiology Database/Fossilworks, where even the methods are open so anyone can play with science if they wish!

Thanks, Jon!

Jon is just one of a growing community of Impactstory Advisors. Want to join the ranks of some of the Web’s most cutting-edge researchers and librarians? Apply to be an Advisor today!