Can we talk about this? Or if I suggest standards are a double-edged sword, will no one listen?
“For altmetrics to move out of its current pilot and proof-of-concept phase, the community must begin coalescing around a suite of commonly understood definitions, calculations, and data sharing practices,” states Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. “Organizations and researchers wanting to apply these metrics need to adequately understand them, ensure their consistent application and meaning across the community, and have methods for auditing their accuracy. We must agree on what gets measured, what the criteria are for assessing the quality of the measures, at what granularity these metrics are compiled and analyzed, how long a period the altmetrics should cover, the role of social media in altmetrics, the technical infrastructure necessary to exchange this data, and which new altmetrics will prove most valuable. The creation of altmetrics standards and best practices will facilitate the community trust in altmetrics, which will be a requirement for any broad-based acceptance, and will ensure that these altmetrics can be accurately compared and exchanged across publishers and platforms.”
“Sensible, community-informed, discipline-sensitive standards and practices are essential if altmetrics are to play a serious role in the evaluation of research,” says Joshua M. Greenberg, Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Digital Information Technology program. “With its long history of crafting just such standards, NISO is uniquely positioned to help take altmetrics to the next level.”
The post on Snowflake Indicators is coming …
jbrittholbrook 