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!

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:

• ImpactStory (née total-impact), 2012
• rOpenSci, 2013
• NISO, 2013
• Dr Holly Bik, 2013

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

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.

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….

ImpactStory has launched!  We’ve refocused and renamed Total-Impact: this first release of ImpactStory is a quantum step forward, debuting badges, normalization, and categorization.

To try out ImpactStory, start by visiting http://impactstory.org and point to the scholarly products you’ve made.  Articles can be easily imported from Google Scholar Profiles, DOIs, and PubMed IDs.  We also have importers for software on GitHub, presentations on SlideShare, and datasets on Dryad (and we’ve got more importers on the way).

ImpactStory searches over a dozen Web APIs to learn where your stuff is making an impact. Instead of a Wall Of Numbers, we categorize your impacts along two dimensions: audience (scholars or the public) and type of engagement with research (view, discuss, save, cite, and recommend).

As you drill into the details of an item in your report, you can see a graph of the percentile score for each metric compared to a baseline.  In the case of articles, the baseline is “articles indexed in Web of Science that year.” If your 2009 paper has 17 Mendeley readers, for example, that puts you in the 87th-98th percentile of all WoS-indexed articles published in 2009 (we report percentiles as a range expressing the 95% confidence interval). Since it’s above the 75th percentile, the article is also tagged with a “highly saved by scholars” badge. Scanning the badges helps you get a sense of your collection’s overall strengths, while also letting  you easily spot success stories.

Interested?  Have a look at this sample collection, or even better, go create your own report!

We’re excited for folks to try out ImpactStory, and excited to get feedback; it’s a beta release, and want to listen to the community as we prioritize new features. Working together, we can build something that helps reseachers tell data driven stories that push us beyond the Impact Factor and beyond the article.

For more information:

• application: http://impactstory.org
• blog: http://blog.impactstory.org
• twitter @ImpactStory (renamed from @totalimpactorg, so no updates required)
• submit and vote on new features ideas
• subscribe to our discussion group

Total-impact is in the process of incorporating as a non-profit, which means (among other things) we need to form a Board of Directors. 

It was been a tough decision, since we are lucky to know tons of qualified people, and there’s not even a standard number of people to pick. After much discussion, though, we decided two things:

• Small is better than big. We like being light and agile, and fewer people is consistent with that.
• Aim high. Worst that can happen is they say no.

The first point led us to a board of four people: the two of us and two more. The second point led us to ask our best-case-scenario choices, Cameron Neylon and John Wilbanks. Both these guys are whip smart, extraordinary communicators, and respected leaders in the open science communities. Both have extensive experience working with researchers and funders (our users) at all levels. And both mix principle and pragmatism in their writing and work in a way that resonates with us. These people are, along pretty much every dimension, our dream board.

And we are immensely excited (I am literally bouncing in my seat at the coffee shop as I write this) to now publicly announce: they both said yes.  So welcome, Cameron and John. We’re excited to start changing how science works, together.

We created total-impact’s “@totalpimpactdev” Twitter account a while ago, as a way to keep our small group of developers and early users enlooped about changes to the code. Since then, total-impact has matured past the point where only developers care.

So, we’re updating our Twitter handle accordingly: we’re now tweeting from @totalimpactorg. If you follow us already, no need to change anything. If you don’t, do! Our codebase and feature list are improving almost daily, and our Twitter feed is a great way to stay up to date.

As of yesterday, I (Jason) have joined Heather in Vancouver for what we’re calling the Megasprint: two months of 12hr-day, take-no-prisoners, hardcore hacking on total-impact. We’re working toward the mid-September release of our next version, codenamed Bruce (total-impact sounds like an action movie name…why fight it). 

Bruce will be our first heavily-publicized release (there will be t-shirts!), and will feature collection-level analysis and visualization tools, data from tons of new providers, and support for collections tracking hundreds of thousands of articles, datasets, software projects, and more. And of course the ability to knock Alan Rickman off a building.

We’re super excited about all we’ll be able to get done in the next, intense two months…stay tuned!