Nettie Lagace
Associate Director for Programs
National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
Todd Carpenter
Executive Director
National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
Update on NISO Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group (Lagace, Carpenter):
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Open Access Metadata and Indicators Working Group was chartered in March 2013 to develop protocols and mechanisms for transmitting the access status of scholarly works, such as individual articles. The intent of the group has been to develop a standardized set of metadata elements in order to share accessibility and potential re-use rights, to clarify an environment where it is currently very difficult for stakeholders (funders, authors, librarians, and users) to determine whether a given article is compliant with conditions and policies. The area in which it has worked is a contentious one, with many differing opinions among stakeholders on what constitutes “open access.” These elements developed as part of the group’s recommendations that the elements be machine-readable to enable systems to intake the data and re-use it in whatever form is appropriate for its own context. The Working Group’s draft specification is expected to be available for public review and comment in late 2013, with formal publication taking place in early 2014.
NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Project: What’s Happening in Phase 1, What Will Happen in Phase 2 (Carpenter):
Research environments rely critically on methods of assessment of scholarship. Assessment impacts most elements of the research process, from which projects get funded to who gains promotion and tenure and which publications gain prominence in fields of inquiry. Alternative metrics (often referred to as “alt metrics”) are increasingly being explored, discussed and used by publishers, funders and research departments as an expansion of the tools available for measuring the scholarly impact of research in the burgeoning Web-based communication, collaboration, and publication environment. There is a growing movement toward fuller development of these measurements and the understanding of gaps that need to be filled in order to facilitate their adoption, at least as a compliment to the existing methods of measuring scholarly impact, formal citation counts and the Journal Impact Factor.
NISO has undertaken, with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a two-phase initiative to explore, identify, and advance standards and/or best practices related to a new suite of potential metrics in the community: “altmetrics.” These eventual standards and best practices could include agreement on what gets measured; what criteria for quality should be applied; how granularly data should be gathered and measured; and/or the technical infrastructure necessary to exchange data, among other possibilities. The project work, currently in its first phase, consists of NISO convening open face-to-face and Web-based meetings of stakeholders and interested parties, where discussions and brainstorming activity will be facilitated and subsequently distilled into potential action items. One meeting has already taken place in San Francisco in October 2013; two more are planned: one on December 11, immediately following CNI, in Washington, DC, and the other in January 2014 in Philadelphia in conjunction with the American Library Association Midwinter conference. This presentation will describe the background and impetus for the project, the input and perspectives received from various stakeholders so far, further work planned in Phase 2, and how outputs will be executed.
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/oami/
http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/