Open Science & Altmetrics Monthly Roundup (August 2014)

August was a huge month for open science and altmetrics. Here are some of the highlights:

AAAS shrugs off scientists voicing concern

More than 100 scientists signed a letter of concern addressed to AAAS regarding their new “open access” journal, Science Advances–specifically, the journal’s exorbitant publication fees and restrictive licensing requirements.

As Liz Allen over on the ScienceOpen blog reports, the AAAS issued a “classic PR” piece in response. AAAS’s post doesn’t directly address the letter, and doubles down on their commitment to keeping Science Advances prohibitively expensive to publish in and difficult to remix and reuse for the benefit of science.

After a private phone call between AAAS’s Marcia McNutt and Jon Tennant and no indication that AAAS would reconsider their stance, Erin McKeirnan and Jon Tennant penned a final article expressing their disappointment in the organization.

Be sure to follow Jon Tennant and Erin McKeirnan, who spearheaded the effort to write the letters of concern and are talking candidly on Twitter about further developments (or lack thereof).

International Research, Science and Education Organizations tell STM Publishers: No New Licenses!

In early August, a similar kerfuffle emerged over the issue of content licensing for scientific publications. Creative Commons licenses have been the defacto standard for scientific publishing for years due to their simplicity of use and recognition, but the Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers have released a suite of specialized licenses that some say intentionally confuse authors.

From the PLOS website:

The Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers has recently released a set of model licenses for research articles. In their current formulation, these licenses would limit the use, reuse and exploitation of research. They would make it difficult, confusing or impossible to combine these research outputs with other public resources and sources of knowledge to the benefit of both science and society. There are many issues with these licenses, but the most important is that they are not compatible with any of the globally used Creative Commons licenses. For this reason, we call on the STM Association to withdraw them and commit to working within the Creative Commons framework. [Click to read the full letter.]

The Association of STM Publishers issued a response, which unfortunately dismissed the concerns raised. Catriona MacCallum and Cameron Neylon at PLOS continue to coordinate outreach on the issue; check out the PLOS Opens blog for the most up-to-date information, and consider contacting your favorite journals’ editorial boards to voice support for Creative Commons licenses.

Other Altmetrics and Open Science News

Shape the way publishers credit academic labor and expertise in scientific author lists: What can we do about honorary authorships and uncredited work in academia? CASRAI and ORCID have an idea: create a taxonomy for scientific author roles to help clarify who gets credited (and for what) on the byline of academic articles. Head over to the F1000Research blog to learn more and offer your feedback before Sept. 12.
Some scientists don’t find the Kardashian Index very funny: Since we covered a parody impact measure called the Kardashian Index in last month’s roundup, many have weighed in. Turns out, not everyone thought it was very funny, and many (rightly) called out the article for its belittling of scientists who engage others via social media. To read the responses and share your thoughts, visit the LSE Impact Blog.
More scholars post, discuss, and comment on research on Twitter than academic social networks like ResearchGate: Nature News surveyed more than 3,000 scientists on their use of social networks, and some of the results were surprising. For example, scientists are primarily on Academia.edu and ResearchGate for the same reason they’re on LinkedIn: just in case they’re contacted. And they more often share their work and follow conversations on Twitter than academic social networking sites. Check out the rest of the reported results over on Nature News.
Impactstory, PlumX, and Altmetric add new altmetric indicators: August saw an increase in the types of metrics reported by altmetrics aggregators. Impactstory recently added viewership statistics letting users know how often their embedded content has been viewed on Impactstory.org. PlumX rolled out GoodReads metrics, increasing altmetrics coverage for books. And Altmetric.com now tracks mentions of research articles in policy documents–a big win for understanding how academic research influences public policy.
“GitHub for research” raising $1.5 million in funding: The creators of PubChase, Zappy Lab, are seeking funding for Protocols.io, a scientific protocols sharing and reuse repository. In addition to the private, “angel” funding they’ve raised to date, they’re also pursuing crowdfunding via Kickstarter. Check it out today.
You can now share your work directly on Impactstory: we’ve gotten a lot of love this week for our newest feature: embeddable content. It’s just one of the many we’re rolling out before September 15. Here’s how embedded articles, slides, and code look on others’ profiles; login to your profile and start sharing your work!

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Share your articles, slides and more on Impactstory

We said we were going to have big changes live by Sept 15th when early adopters’ free trials expire. Well here’s our first one: Impactstory’s now a great place to freely share your articles, slides, videos, and more–and get viewership stats to track impacts even better.

Share everything

Before, product pages focused just on the metrics for your research products. Those metrics are still there, but now the focus is on the product itself. Yep, that’s right: people can now view and read your work right on Impactstory. So we’re not just a place to share the impact of your work, we’re also a place to share your actual research.

It’s super easy to upload your preprints to Impactstory (and you should!). But it gets even better–for most OA publications, we automatically embed the PDF for you. It’s handy, and it’s a also great example of the kind of interoperability OA makes possible.

But as y’all know, at Impactstory we’re passionate about supporting scholarly products beyond articles. So we’re also automatically embedding a slew of other tasty product types. GitHub repo? We’ve got your README file embedded. Figshare image? Yup, that’s on your profile now too. You want to view videos from Vimeo and YouTube, and slides from Slideshare, right on your Impactstory page? Done.

Discover how many people are viewing your research

We’re also rolling out viewership stats for your Impactstory product page. So not only do you learn when folks are citing, discussing, and saving your work–you learn when they’re reading it, too. Over time we’ll likely add viewership maps and other ways to dig into this data even more.

Why you should upload your work to Impactstory

Sharing your work directly on Impactstory has lots of advantages. It brings all your product types together in one place, under your brand as a researcher, not under the brand of a journal or institution. It also makes the case for your research’s value better than metrics alone–it helps you tell a fuller impact story.

Uploading your work is also a great quick way to just get your work out there. In that regard it’s kind of like what Academia.edu and ResearchGate offer–except we don’t make potential readers create an account to access your work. It’s open. We don’t yet have comprehensive preservation strategy (persistent IDs, CLOCKSS, etc), but we’ll be listening to see if there’s demand for that.

As you may notice, we are super excited about this feature. We’re going to be working hard to get the word out about it to our users, and we’re counting on all or your help on that. And of course as always we’d also love your feedback, particularly on bugs; a feature this big will certainly need a few as users to kick the tires.

And now we’re transitioning to working our next big set of features…can’t wait to launch those over the next two weeks!

One month, three exciting new Impactstory features

In our last post, we hinted at the cool new set of features we’re rolling out over the next month as part of our Five Meter release. We wanted to give you the inside scoop on these features before their debut and get your feedback!

Easier import to Impactstory, and keeping your profile more up-to-date

We know how much of a pain it is to keep your CV up-to-date, so we’re going to make Impactstory that much better at keeping your it current, without the need for you to do much (if anything at all).

We’re currently exploring routes to implementation that include:

Increasing the speed with which we sample third-party sites like Figshare and ORCID, so there’s less of a lag between when new products are added to those sites and when they appear on Impactstory. (That lag is currently one week, which is awesome for many of our users, but could be improved upon.)
Allowing you to email us a link or citation to a new product
Allowing you to tweet at us with certain hashtags and links to new products

Assuming you have to do anything at all to update your Impactstory profile, how would you prefer to do it? Forwarding manuscript acceptance emails? A bookmarklet a la Mendeley? What’s the easiest and least-hassle way we could do this for you?

Upload OA versions of your papers directly to Impactstory

This was one of the most wanted features mentioned in recent user interviews. And since we’re aiming to make Impactstory a solid replacement for scientists’ online web presence and CV, it follows that we should debut a feature that will allow researchers to share their work like they would on their website, but with less hassle.

What we’re most excited about for this feature debut is the ability to now track pageview and download counts for content that previously couldn’t be easily tracked on scientists’ websites.

The feature won’t provide permanent IDs like DOIs for uploaded content, nor will it provide full-scale archival preservation for content for now (like Figshare and many institutional repositories currently do, thanks to partnerships with CLOCKSS, etc). But we (like many of you) believe in the importance of permanent IDs and digital preservation. We’ll be keeping those issues in mind for future improvements and listening to see how much demand there is from users like you.

Ability to customize your profile’s appearance

You’ll soon be able to prioritize content and choose what people can see on your Impactstory profile, including current profile content and also new types of content that we’re calling widgets (think WordPress widgets).

Some widgets we’re aiming to debut include: the ability to feature a paper or product you’re proud of (as well as their metrics), a “bio” section, a research interests section, and integration with your blog.

Are there other uses for a customizable UI or types of widgets you’d love to see?

We’re also going to reformat profile badges to make ‘em more informative: the reformat will include the actual metrics themselves, percentile information, and possibly other information.

The customizable UI feature debut, as a whole, will set the stage for an oft-requested feature: the ability to group products into research packages.

Cool, so what’s next?

We’re going to start rolling this features out ASAP–the upload feature will likely be the first to happen, and it might happen later this week. We’re aiming to have all of these implemented by September 15.

We’d love to get your feedback in the comments on the questions we pose here, and welcome your thoughts over on the Feedback Forum on new features to consider implementing in our next sprints.

New pricing and new features, coming Sept 15th

It’s been an active couple of weeks at Impactstory. We’ve been thrilled at all the feedback we’ve received on our sustainability plan announcement, and we really appreciate the time many of you have put into sharing your thoughts with us.

Inspired by some of this feedback we’ve made some new plans. To continue furthering our vision of Impactstory as a professional-grade scholarly tool, in one month we’ll be adjusting the subscription price for new subscribers, and to go with it, launching an exciting to set of features. Read on!

The suggestions

Many have suggested we go back to a free or freemium model, or find someone to charge other than our core users. And though we understand the appeal of these approaches (they were actually our Plan A for a long time), we won’t be going down those paths in the foreseeable future. We’ve written about why elsewhere, as have some of our users and other folks around the web (Stefan’s post on the Paperpile blog was particularly good).

There was also a second set of suggestions, from folks who argued we should be charging more for Impactstory. Now that caught us by surprise.

To let you in on some of the background for why we chose our current price, we actually started with the idea of two bucks monthly. We knew the jump from free to subscription would sting, so we wanted to make it small. And we knew that we still have a ways to go before we deliver really compelling value for many users, so we wanted to ask for as little as we could. After a lot of discussion and some interviews, we eventually dared to push a bit higher, but drew the line at five dollars.

Undercharging? Seriously?

To hear that we might be undercharging was a bit of a shock. But when we examined the arguments for a higher price point, they made a lot of sense:

Your price establishes the perceived value of your product.
Your price only makes sense in relation to your market. Impactstory doesn’t have direct competitors, but we can look at the market for generally similar services. When we do, you see clusters around two price points: (1) free, like ResearchGate, Facebook, and so on, and (2) about $10/mo like GitHub or Spotify or Netflix. Crucially, there’s almost no one charging $5 monthly.
If we’re the cheapest thing people pay for, we’re establishing our value as the least important thing they pay for. That’s not the niche we’re shooting for.
And worse, people always assume you’re worth a bit less than you charge. So if our cost is “cheapest thing that’s not free,” then people assume our real value is: free. Nothing, no value.

This last point was particularly compelling when we read it, because it gets to the heart of why we’re charging in the first place: if we’re going to change researcher behavior and change the world, we have to establish ourselves as a professional-grade tool.

We can’t afford to be just something fun and cheap. And so we need to set a price that says that, loud and clear. It looks like we got that price a little wrong with our first shot, and so we we’re going to adjust it.

So we’re making a change

We’re raising our subscription price to $60/year or $10/month, effective September 15th (one month hence).

Anyone who subscribes between now and September 15 will lock in their subscription at $5/month. Everyone’s free trial will be extended till then, and new users will receive a 30 day trial. And of course the no-questions-asked waiver will still be available.

But there’s a second part of this, too. Because raising the price can’t be the whole plan.

We get that some have been hesitant to use Impactstory for free. Part of the issue is that altmetrics aren’t widely accepted yet. We also know that if we want to sell Impactstory as a professional-grade tool with practical value for cutting-edge researchers, we’re going to need some very significant upgrades to what Impactstory does. It’s got to be worth the high price. That’s the whole point.

And so we’re going to be worth it

That’s why September 15th will also mark the completion of a huge new set of Impactstory features, collectively code-named Five Meter. We’ll be rolling these out over the course of the next month. It’s going to be one of our biggest feature pushes ever, and it’s going to be awesome.

The Five Meter spec isn’t 100% decided yet, but it’ll include a new more customizable profile page, stats on your twitter account and blog, support for your own domain name, new badges, and more. Once these new features ship on September 15, our entire team is going to delete our professional webpages and online CVs, because at that point, Impactstory will be doing everything our webpages and online CVs do but better.

We think that’s something a lot of other researchers will want too, and want hard. And after a lot of conversation with the vanguard of web-native scientists–the folks we’re focused on right now–we’re convinced that’s an Impactstory they’ll gladly pay for. An Impactstory they’ll use, in earnest. And an Impactstory that’s way closer to transforming the way science is evaluated and shared.

As always, we’d love to hear questions or feedback! Email us at team@impactstory.org or tweet us at @impactstory.

All our best,

The Impactstory Team

P. S. Want to lock down that $45/year rate we talk about above? Login to your Impactstory profile, then head to Settings > Subscription. And if you aren’t already an Impactstory user but want to check out all the awesome new features we’ll be rolling out this month, sign up for a 30-day free trial now. Cheers!

Impactstory Advisor of the Month: Megan O’Donnell (August 2014)

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!

Open Science & Altmetrics Monthly Roundup (July 2014)

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!

Impactstory announces a new sustainability model: $5/month subscriptions

Last week, we announced that we’re switching our non-profit sustainability model to a subscription plan: $5 per month after a free, 14-day trial period. From the Impactstory blog:

Our goal has always been for Impactstory to support a second scientific revolution, transforming how academia finds, shares, understands, and rewards research impact. Today we believe in that goal more than ever. That’s why we’re a nonprofit, and always will be. But this transformation is not going to happen overnight. We need a sustainability model that can grow with us, beyond our next year of Sloan and NSF funding. This is that model.

So what does five bucks a month buy you? It buys you the best place in the world to learn and share your scholarly impact. It buys you a profile not built on selling your personal data, or cramming your page with ads, or our ability to hustle up more funding.

Five bucks buys you a profile built on a simple premise: we’ll deliver real, practical value to researchers, every day. And we’ll do it staying a nonprofit that’s fiercely commitment to independence, openness, and transparency.

To read the full announcement, check out last Thursday’s post.

The K(ardashian)-Index debuts

Neil Hall has caused a stir with his paper, “The Kardashian index: a measure of discrepant social media profile for scientists” published last week in Genome Biology. The tongue-in-cheek article outlines Hall’s idea for a metric that identifies scientists whose presence on Twitter isn’t matched by a record of scholarly impact, evidenced by many citations to their work. Here’s how the index works:

Where “F(a) is the actual number of twitter followers of researcher X and F(c) is the number researcher X should have given their citations.”

While many viewed Hall’s paper as being all in good fun, some are concerned that by denigrating those with more Twitter followers than would be “appropriate” given their number of citations, it reinforces the idea that a very narrow type of scholarly impact is the type of impact that matters most, above and beyond one’s ability to communicate with others about the work they’re doing.

And by making fun of the idea that there might be more flavors of impact than traditionally assumed, we disincentivize researchers from ever breaking from the conservative approaches to measuring impact–approaches that no longer fully reflect reality for those practicing web-native science.

Huge progress made on 20+ Open Science projects at Mozilla Science Global Sprint

On July 22 New Zealand Standard Time, an international team of coders and scientists began a 52-hour sprint to improve Open Science lessons and learning materials, teaching tools, and software and standards for better science. The sprint was organized by Mozilla Science and coordinated virtually across the world using collaborative notepads, video conferencing software, and GitHub. Among the improvements made to Open Science software and standards was work done on Scholarly Markdown, the Open Access Button, and reproducible research guidelines. Improvements to teaching materials included bioinformatics, medical imaging, and oceanography capstone examples for Software Carpentry courses; Data Carpentry training materials like social science examples and lessons on Excel; and a great guide to using Excel for science. For more info, including can’t-miss links to other great Open Science projects, check out the Mozilla Science blog.

Other Open Science & Altmetrics News

Open Notebook Science marches on at the Jean Claude Bradley Memorial Symposium: In early July, Open Science advocates gathered for a one-day symposium celebrating the life and work of Jean Claude Bradley, Open Notebook Science pioneer. Some of Open Science’s finest minds presented at the meeting, including Antony Williams (Royal Society of Chemistry) and Peter Murray-Rust (Cambridge University). For more info, including links to the presentations, visit the JCBMS wiki.
1:am altmetrics conference dates announced: The organizers of London’s first altmetrics conference released meeting dates and a preliminary lineup. 1:am will be held September 25-26, 2014 at the Wellcome Collection in London. Speaking will be publisher, researcher, and institutional representatives including Jennifer Lin of PLOS, Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton, Arfon Smith of GitHub, and Sarah Callaghan of the Research Data Alliance’s Metrics working group. Impactstory will also be in (virtual) attendance, outlining our non-profit’s vision for an Open altmetrics infrastructure. Sound interesting? Check out the 1:am website for more information and to purchase tickets.
Digital Science-backed startups had a big month: The innovative Macmillan Publishing subsidiary, Digital Science, had two cool announcements for the Open Science community in July: they invested in Write LaTeX, the startup responsible for Overleaf, a real-time, collaborative word processing environment for authoring scientific publications; and Figshare (who Digital Science also backs) was named Wired UK’s Startup of the Week. Congrats!
As WSSSPE2 approaches, killer papers on software sustainability and impacts are going online: The second Working towards Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE) workshop is still months away, but we’re already seeing awesome papers like this one by Dan Katz (NSF) and Arfon Smith (GitHub) on creating mechanisms for assigning credit to software creators, and this one by James Howison (University of Texas at Austin) that proposes retracting bit-rotten publications in order to incentivize researchers to keep their research software accessible and usable. It’s obvious that excellent research will be shared at WSSSPE2 in November; for more information on the conference, check out the WSSSPE2 website.
The 2014 Open Knowledge Festival was a resounding success: Reports from the 2014 Open Knowledge Festival came streaming in across the Internet not long after the meeting ended in mid-July. Some highlights of the coverage: the OKFestival’s own Storify feeds describe the wealth of activities that happened at the Fest; festival goers were treated to excellent company and conversation at the ScienceOpen-sponsored ice cream break; and Lou Woodley’s apt write-up of the entire Festival, which drove home the point that in-person meetings are important–they bring like-minded people together and create opportunities for collaboration that you don’t often get by watching a meeting’s livestream.

Stay connected

Speaking of “bringing like minded people together”: 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.

Starting today, Impactstory profiles will cost $5/month. Here’s why that’s a good thing.

Starting today, Impactstory profiles cost $5 per month.

Why? Because our goal has always been for Impactstory to support a second scientific revolution, transforming how academia finds, shares, understands, and rewards research impact. That’s why we’re a nonprofit, and always will be. But (news flash), that transformation is not going to happen overnight. We need a sustainability model that can grow with us, beyond our next year of Sloan and NSF funding. This is that model.

Five bucks buys you a profile built on a simple premise: we’ll deliver real, practical value to real researchers, every day. And we’ll do it staying a nonprofit that’s fiercely committed to independence, openness, and transparency. Want to fork our app and build a better one? Awesome, here’s all our code. Want access to the data behind your profile? Of course: it’s one click away, in JSON or CSV, as open as we can make it. And that ain’t changing. It’s who we are.

We’ve talked to a lot of users that feel $5/month is a fair deal. Which is great; we agree. But we know some folks may feel differently, and that’s great too. Because if you’re in that second group, we want to hear from you. We’re passionate about building the online profile you do think is worth $5 a month. In fact, we’re doing a huge round of interviews right now…if you’ve got ideas, drop us a line at team@impactstory.org and we’ll schedule a chat. Let’s change the world, together.

New signups will get a 14-day free trial. If you’re a user now, you’ll also get a 14-day trial; plus if you subscribe you’ll get a cool “Impactstory: Early Adopter” sticker for your laptop. If you’re in a spot where you can’t afford five bucks a month, we understand. We’ve got a no-questions-asked waiver; just drop us a line showing us how you’re linking to your Impactstory profile in your email signature and we’ll send you a coupon for a free account.

We’re nervous about this change in some ways; it’s not exactly what we’d imagined for Impactstory from the beginning. But we’re confident it’s the right call, and we’re excited about the future. We’re changing the world. And we’re delivering concrete value to users. And we’re not gonna stop.

Your questions, answered: introducing the Impactstory Knowledge Base

We’re launching a new feature today to make it even easier to use Impactstory: the Impactstory Knowledge Base.

We’ve seeded the Knowledge Base with answers to users’ frequently asked questions: how to create, populate and update your Impactstory profile, embed your Impactstory profile in other websites, and more. And we’ll be adding more articles–particularly those aimed at “power users”–in the coming months.

Head over to the Knowledge Base now to check it out!

Got a “how to” you want us to add in our next round of edits to the Knowledge Base? Email us at team@impactstory.org to share it.

7 ways to make your Google Scholar Profile better

Albert Einstein's Google Scholar profile

Google Scholar Profiles are useful, but are not as good as they could be. In our last post, we identified their limitations: dirty data, a closed platform, and a narrow understanding of what constitutes scholarly impact.

That said, Google Scholar Profiles are still an important tool for thousands of academics worldwide. So, how can researchers overcome Google Scholar Profiles’ weaknesses?

In this post, we share 7 essential tips for your Google Scholar Profile. They’ll keep your citation data clean, help you keep tabs on colleagues and competitors, increase your “Googlability,” and more. Read on!

1. Clean up your Google Scholar Profile data

Thanks to Google Scholar Profiles’ “auto add” functionality, your Profile might include some articles you didn’t author.

If that’s the case, you can remove them in one of two ways:

clicking on the title of each offending article to get to the article’s page, and then clicking the trashcan/“Delete” button in the top green bar
from the main Profile page, ticking the boxes next to each incorrect article and selecting the “Delete” from the drop-down menu in the top green bar

If you want to prevent incorrect articles from appearing on your profile in the first place, you can change your Profile settings to require Google Scholar to email you for approval before adding anything. To make this change, from your main Profile page, click the “More” button that appears in the top grey bar. Select “Profile updates” and change the setting to “Don’t automatically update my profile.”

Prefer to roll the dice? You can keep a close eye on what articles are automatically added to your profile by signing up for alerts (more info about how to do that below) and manually removing any incorrect additions that appear.

2. Add missing publications to your Profile

Google Scholar is pretty good at adding new papers to your profile automatically, but sometimes articles can fall through the cracks.

To add an article, click “Add” in the top grey bar on the main Profile page. Then, you can add your missing articles in one of three ways:

Click the “Add article manually” link in the left-hand navigation bar. On the next page, add as much descriptive information about your article, book, thesis, patent, or other publication as possible. The more metadata you add, the better a chance Google Scholar has of finding citations to your work.
Click “Add articles” in the left-hand navigation bar to get a list of articles that Google Scholar thinks you may have authored. Select the ones you’ve actually authored and add them to your profile by clicking the “Add” button at the top.
Select “Add add article groups” from the left-hand navigation bar to review groups of articles that Scholar thinks you may have authored under another name. This is a new feature that’s less than perfect–hence we’ve listed it as a last choice for ways to add stuff to your profile.

Got all your publications added to your Profile? Good, now let’s move on.

3. Increase your “Googleability”

One benefit to Google Scholar Profiles is that they function as a landing page for your publications. But that functionality only works if your profile is set to “public.”

Double-check your profile visibility by loading your profile and, at the top of the main page, confirming that it reads, “My profile is public” beneath your affiliation information.

If it’s not already public, change your profile visibility by clicking the “Edit” button at the top of your profile, selecting “My profile is public”, and then clicking “Save”.

4. Use your Google Scholar Profile data to get ahead

Though Google Scholar Profile’s limitations means you can’t use it to completely replace your CV, you can use your Profile data to enhance your CV. You can also use your Profile data in annual reports, grant applications, and other instances where you want to document the impact of your publications.

Google Scholar doesn’t allow users to download a copy of their citation data, unfortunately. Any reuse of Google Scholar Profile data has to be done the old-fashioned way: copying and pasting.

That said, a benefit of regularly updating your CV to include copied-and-pasted Google Scholar Profile citations is that it’s a low-tech backup of your Google Scholar Profile data–essential in case Google Scholar is ever deprecated.

5. Stay up-to-date when you’ve been cited

One benefit to Google Scholar Profiles is that you can “Follow” yourself to get alerts whenever you’re cited. As we described in our Ultimate guide to staying up-to-date on your articles’ impact:

Visit your profile page and click the blue “Follow” button at the top of your profile. Click it. Enter your preferred email address in the box that appears, then click “Create alert.” You’ll now get an alert anytime you’ve received a citation.

Easy, right?

You can also click “Follow new articles” on your own profile to be emailed every time a new article is added automatically–key to making sure the data in your Profile is clean, as we discussed in #1 above.

6. …and stay up-to-date on your colleagues and competitors, too

Similarly, you can sign up to receive an email every time someone else receives a new citation or publishes a new article. (I like to think of it as “business intelligence” for busy academics.) It’s as easy as searching for them by name and, on their profile page, clicking “Follow new articles” or “Follow new citations.”

7. Tell Google Scholar how it can improve

Finally, Google Scholar–like most services–relies on your feedback in order to improve. Get in touch with them via this Contact Us link to let them know how they can better their platform. (Be sure to mention that an open API is key to filling the service gaps they can’t offer, especially with respect to altmetrics!)

Do you have Google Scholar Profiles hacks that you use to get around your Profile’s limitations? Leave them in the comments below or join the conversation on Twitter @impactstory!

Updated 12/19/2014 to reflect changes in the Google Scholar profile redesign.

4 reasons why Google Scholar isn’t as great as you think it is

These days, you’d be hard-pressed to find an academic who doesn’t think that Google Scholar Profiles are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Some days, I agree.

Why? Because my Google Scholar Profile captures more citations to my work than Web of Knowledge or Scopus, automatically adds (and tracks citations for) new papers I’ve published, is better at finding citations that appear in non-English language publications, and gives me a nice fat h-index. I’m sure you find it valuable for similar reasons.

And yet, Google Scholar is still deeply flawed. It has some key disadvantages that keep it from being as awesome as most imagine that it is.

In this post, I’m going to do some good ol’ fashioned consciousness-raising and describe Google Scholar Profiles’ limitations. And in our next post, I’ll share tips I’ve learned for getting the most out of your Google Scholar Profile, limitations be darned.

1. Google Scholar Profiles include dirty data

Let’s begin with the most basic element of your Profile: your name. If your name includes diacritics, ligatures, or even apostrophes, Google Scholar may be missing citations to your work. (Sorry, O’Connor!) And if you have a common name, it’s likely you’ll end up with others’ publications in your Profile, which you are unfortunately responsible for identifying and removing. (We’ll cover how to do that in our next post.)

Now, what about the quality of citations? Google Scholar claims to pull citations from anywhere on the scholarly web into your Profile, but their definition of “the scholarly web” is less rigorous than many people realize. For example, our co-founder, Heather, has citations on her Google Scholar Profile for a Friendfeed post. And o thers have found Google Scholar citations to their work in student handbooks and LibGuides–not the worst places you can get a cite from, but still: Nature they ain’t.

Google Scholar citations are also, like any metric, susceptible to gaming. But whereas organizations like PLOS and Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Index will flag and ban those found to be gaming the system, Google Scholar does not respond quickly (if at all) to reports of gaming. And as researchers point out, Google’s lack of transparency with respect to how data is collected means that gaming is all the more difficult to discover.

The service also misses citations in a treasure-trove of scholarly material that’s stored in institutional repositories. Why? Because Google Scholar won’t harvest information from repositories in the format that repositories across the world tend to use (Dublin Core).

Google Scholar Profile data is far from perfect, but that’s a small problem compared to the next issue.

2. Google Scholar Profiles may not last

Remember Google Reader? Google has a history of killing beloved products when the bottom line is in question. It’s not exaggerating to say that Google Scholar Profiles could literally go away at any moment.

To me, it’s not unlike the problem of monoculture in agriculture. Monoculture can be a good thing. For those unfamiliar with the term, monoculture is when farmers identify the most powerful species of a crop–the one that is easiest to grow and yields the best harvest year after year–and then grow that crop exclusively. Google Scholar Profiles were, for a long time, the most easy to use and powerful citation reports available to scholars, and so Google Scholar has become one of the most-used platforms in academia.

But monoculture is also risky. Growing only one species of a crop can be catastrophic to a nation’s food supply if, for example, that species were wiped out by blight one year. Similarly, academia’s near-singular dependence on Google Scholar Profile data could be harmful to many if Google Scholar were to be shelved.

3. Google Scholar Profiles won’t allow itself to be improved upon

Other issues aside, it’s worth acknowledging that Google Scholar Profiles are very good at doing one thing: finding citations on the scholarly web. But that’s pretty much all they do, and Google is actively preventing anyone else from improving upon their service.

It’s been pointed out before that the lack of a Google Scholar API means that no one can add value to or improve the tool. That means that services like Impactstory cannot include citations from Google Scholar on Impactstory, nor can we build upon Google Scholar Profiles to find and display metrics beyond citations or automatically push new publications to Profiles. Based on the number of Google Scholar-related help tickets we receive, this lack of interoperability is a major pain point for researchers.

4. Google Scholar Profiles only measure a narrow kind of scholarly impact

Google Scholar Profiles aren’t designed to meet the needs of web-native scholarship. These days, researchers are putting their software, data, posters, and other scholarly products online alongside their papers. Yet Google Scholar Profiles don’t allow them to track citations–nor any other type of impact indicator, including altmetrics–to those outputs.

Google Scholar Profiles also promote a much-maligned One Metric to Rule Them All: the h-index. We’ve already talked about the many reasons why scholars should stop caring about the h-index; most of those reasons stem from the fact that h-indices, like Google Scholar Profiles, aren’t designed with web-native scholarship in mind.

Now that we’re clear on the limitations of Google Scholar Profiles, we’ll help you overcome ‘em by sharing 7 essential workarounds for your Google Scholar Profile in tomorrow’s post. Stay tuned!