Open Access Week dominated Open Science conversation this month, along with interesting UK debates on metrics and several valuable studies being released. Read on for more on all of it!

UK debates use of metrics in research evaluation

Academia’s biggest proponents and critics of altmetrics descended on the University of Sussex on October 7 for the event, “In Metrics We Trust?”.

Some of the most interesting finds shared at the meeting?

• REF peer reviewers admitted they spend less than 15 minutes reviewing papers for quality, due to the sheer volume of products that need evaluation,

• Departmental h-indices tend to correlate with REF/RAE evaluations, leading some to argue that time and money could be saved by replacing future REF exercises with metrics, and

• Leading bibliometrics researchers disagree on whether altmetrics could be used for evaluation. Some said they cannot, no matter what; others said that they can, because altmetrics measure different impacts than citations measure.

The meeting ended with no clear answer as to whether metrics are definitely right (or wrong) for use in the next REF. We’ll have to wait for the HEFCEmetric committee’s recommendations when they issue their report in June.

Until then, check out the full debate in our Storify of the event, as well as Ernesto Priego’s archive of related tweets.

OA Week 2014 recap

The Impactstory team is still recovering from Open Access Week 2014, which saw us talking to over 100 researchers and librarians in 9 countries over 5 days. A full recap of our talks can be found on the Impactstory blog, along with “The Right Metrics for Generation Open: a Guide to getting credit for Open Science”, based on our most popular webinar from the week.

Interest in Open Access and Open Science has risen over the past year, making this year’s Open Access Week successful according to all reports. As Heather Morrison has documented on her blog, the past year has seen an increase in the availability OA documents and data–ArXiv.org alone has grown by 11%!

Other altmetrics & Open Science news

• Software Discovery Index needs your feedback by Nov. 1: The Software Discovery Index could make it easier to find and reuse research software and code, eliminating frustration, waste, and duplicated effort. Read the proposal and submit your feedback here.

• Impactstory co-founder Heather Piwowar launched mini-tour of Australia: Heather’s visited Melbourne so far, delivering a keynote at the eResearch Austrailasia conference as well as leading an ANDS-sponsored workshop. In early November, she’ll also visit Brisbane and Sydney to talk altmetrics and Open Data. See her full schedule on the Impactstory blog.

• Open Access articles receive more altmetrics: Euan Adie of Altmetric.com compared the online attention that OA and non-OA articles recently published in Nature Communications received, with not-so-surprising results. Open Access articles receive many more tweets and Mendeley bookmarks than paywalled content. The full results and an explanation of the study are available on Figshare.

• Data-level metrics to be researched thanks to NSF grant: the PLOS, DataONE, and California Digital Library-backed team plans to investigate how the sharing and reuse of research data can be measured using altmetrics and webometrics. Read their successful grant proposal here, and check out our blog post for some preliminary thoughts on what metrics might tell us about the use of research data.

• More great Impactstory features debut: you can now sort your research products by data, first author, or title; add Publons open peer reviews to your profile; and see who the most influential tweeps are that mention your paper online. Plus, we’ve added the ability for you to buy subscriptions for your colleagues, students, lab, or department. Sign into your Impactstory profile to explore these and recent other changes!

• “Elite” journals are losing their dominance: researchers have found that from 1995-2003, the number of most-cited articles published in “non-elite” journals grew by 45%. Read the study on ArXiv.org.

Did we miss anything?

What was your favorite event or new study released this month? Share it in the comments below, or on Twitter (you can find us @Impactstory).