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!

GitHub & co. continue working to incentivize open science software

This month, collaborative coding site GitHub updated the public on their work with Figshare, Zenodo, and Mozilla Science to create citable code for academic software. Now, you can make any GitHub repository more citable–and accessible over time–by minting a DOI for it.

Researchers at the SciForge project responded to the announcement with a list of “10 non-trivial things GitHub & friends can do for science.” In their post, they pointed out that minting DOIs for software code is just the tip of the iceberg. Other challenges include reconciling GitHub’s commercial interests with what’s best for the scientific community, maintaining metadata quality for metadata submitted to DOI registries via Figshare and Zenodo, and optimizing how DOIs are issued for software that has multiple versions.

Of course, not everyone uses GitHub to manage their research software to begin with. If you’re a GitHub beginner, check out Carly Strasser’s “GitHub: a primer for researchers” and the GitHub guide to getting started.

Originator of Open Notebook Science, Jean-Claude Bradley, Dies

Chemist and Open Science advocate Jean-Claude Bradley passed away this month. Bradley is most famous for coining the term Open Notebook Science, which he used to describe his practice of “making all your research freely available to the public, and in real time”. His lab did its work this way for years. The Open Science community has lost a giant. Jean-Claude will be greatly missed.

How many scholarly documents are on the Web?

According to research published this month in PLOS ONE, “the [lower bound] number of scholarly documents, published in English, available on the web is roughly 114 million.”

Why is this important? Well, with the large number of scholarly documents on the web, we can text- and data-mine at scale–so long as these documents are all Open Access. But as @openscience pointed out on Twitter, 3 in 4 scholarly documents on the Web aren’t Open Access–which brings us to our next news item.

Are most researchers Open Access poseurs?

A recent publisher survey of Canadian authors found that while 83% agreed that Open Access to scholarship is important, less than 10% of authors considered OA when deciding where to publish. And a recently tweeted JASIST article from 2013 shows that only around 36% of European authors are taking advantage of publishers’ permissions to post OA copies of otherwise paywalled scholarship.

Why the disconnect between beliefs and practice? It’s not clear from these sources, but we hope that the numbers continue to increase over time, so we end up in a fully Open Access future.

Other recent altmetrics news

• PeerJ makes peer-reviews more citable: the publisher now issues DOIs for open peer-reviews of its articles, making it possible to cite peer reviews using a permanent identifier. In doing so, peer-review contributions will remain accessible over time, even as URLs change, and reviewers will now be able to more easily track citations to their reviews (thereby incentivizing open peer-review).

• Altmetrics-themed workshop at SSP 2014 Meeting: some of the area’s brightest minds–including Euan Adie (Altmetric.com) and William Gunn (Mendeley.com)–participated yesterday in the “21st Century Research Assessment” panel at this year’s Society for Scholarly Publishing annual meeting. As you might expect, the event was highly tweeted: check out the #sspboston hashtag on Twitter to witness the debate.

• Australian and New Zealander librarians sought for altmetrics survey: a team of researchers seeks participants for a survey on support for altmetrics at Australian and New Zealand academic libraries. Respond to the survey on SurveyMonkey before it closes on June 7, 2014.

• Impactstory launches notification emails, Advisors program: Now, you no longer have to visit impactstory.org to find out when your research has received new citations, downloads, or tweets. Instead, we’ll send you an email alert. We’re really excited about this new feature and also about another big launch that happened this month: our Advisors program!

  Impactstory users have been asking us for months how they can help spread the word. So, in addition to launching a Spread the Word resources page, we’ve started an Advisors program, so motivated advocates can better host Impactstory workshops, help us understand their needs, and advocate for altmetrics at their institution.  To learn more–and apply!–visit our website.

Upcoming events you can’t miss

Two great events are happening in June: the Altmetrics14 workshop in Bloomington, Indiana and the Special Library Association 2014 Annual Meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. Heather will appear on an altmetrics panel and at the closing session of SLA ‘14, and Stacy will be in attendance at Altmetrics14. We hope to see you at both events! But if you can’t make ‘em, follow along on Twitter at #sla2014 and #altmetrics14.

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.