Applied Altmetrics: How university presses, academic publishing services and institutional repositories benefit.
Academic institutions are increasingly looking for ways to demonstrate the value and breadth of their publishing activity. Danielle Padula and Catherine Williamslook at how one university, the University of Michigan, have
incorporated altmetrics data as an author service to help academic
colleagues articulate institutional-wide successes.
A key benefit of altmetrics for younger or smaller publishers is
that, unlike the Thomson Reuters’ Impact Factor, there are no criteria
applied to make a title eligible for altmetrics. Beyond assigning a
unique scholarly identifier (such as a DOI or handle.net identifier) to
each individual output, publishers are not required to demonstrate any
of the benchmarks required for obtaining an Impact Factor (such as
publishing regularly and typically being around for about three years
before they will be considered for inclusion).
Increasingly, it’s not just journal articles to which publishers are
interested in applying altmetrics. Some publishers are rolling out
similar data to other forms of content. For example, Michigan Publishing has applied altmetrics data to reports and grey literature.
Image credit: hipster desktop office markus spiske (CC BY)
Charles Watkinson, Director at University of Michigan Press, has been
particularly innovative in his thinking on the adoption of altmetrics
across their content. As an institutional publisher, he states, they not
only place a focus on supporting the academics who publish with them,
but there is also a need to demonstrate the value and worth of their
publishing activities back to the institution that funds them. Using
altmetrics to evidence engagement of their research amongst a broad
audience plays a big part in this, and helps the publishing team
articulate their successes back to their internal stakeholders. The case
study below outlines Michigan Publishing’s approach to altmetrics.
Altmetrics at Michigan Publishing: A Case Study
The situationAs part of one of the world’s leading research libraries, the staff
of Michigan Publishing are responsible for a large portion of the
publishing activity within the University of Michigan. Their activities
include book publishing through the University of Michigan Press
imprint, an open access journal-publishing program, and the
institutional repository, Deep Blue,
which hosts a wide variety of grey literature outputs such as technical
reports, white papers, and electronic dissertations. Substantially
supported by the University (and as a fully open access publisher),
Michigan’s team members are keen to consistently demonstrate their
support for furthering the disciplines in which they publish, which
include a mixture of humanities and the social sciences. A second key
priority for Michigan is demonstrating the value of their activity to
the publicly-funded parent institution that supports them. As such, they
are constantly looking for ways to help researchers not just further
progress in their field, but also to maximize the broader influence and
awareness of their work in a way that can be captured and given context.
The solution
Michigan saw that incorporating altmetrics data across their
platforms could provide valuable feedback for their authors, as well as
data that could be used to report on the reach and influence of their
publishing activity internally. Starting with their journals, with the
intention of expanding coverage to other outputs later on, Michigan has
begun to use the Altmetric badges to track and report on the online
attention their publications receive.
Image credit: David Fulmer University of Michigan Library Card Catalog (CC BY)
Roll outFirst incorporated on their journal articles, Michigan has now rolled out Altmetric data on their open access book program, Digital Culture Books,
and on the institutional repository, Deep Blue. They hope to find ways
of including other content over the next few years, especially the
monographs they publish through University of Michigan Press. A
particular aim across all this activity is to provide authors whose
impact is often underrepresented via traditional measures (books, for
example, do not get an Impact Factor) with a much more granular picture
of how their work has been interpreted and reused. Through altmetrics,
Michigan can deliver these faculty members examples and evidence that
can be used to demonstrate their influence and the reach of their
research.
Feedback so far
Particularly internally, Michigan Press has seen a really positive
response to the inclusion of Altmetric data. The management committee
values being able to have a wider view on the impact of their publishing
program, and the staff within the press are using the data to identify
success stories and to help build future outreach strategy. Feedback
from authors is also proving positive, with many reporting that they
regularly check-in on the altmetrics for their own work and that of
their peers.
This article is an excerpt from The Evolution of Impact Indicators: From bibliometrics to altmetrics, a collection on the state of research impact co-produced by Scholastica and Altmetric.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the
position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School
of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
About the Authors
Danielle Padula is Community Development
Coordinator at Scholastica, where she heads up community outreach and
content creation. Danielle manages Scholastica’s blog and social media
feeds, and creates resources to help journal editors and researchers
navigate the evolving journal-publishing landscape. She tweets for
Scholastica at @scholasticahq.
Catherine Williams is Head of Marketing at
Altmetric. Cat is responsible for determining and overseeing the overall
marketing and outreach strategy of the company, and is actively
involved in the scholarly community. Prior to joining Altmetric, Cat
held marketing roles at Nature Publishing Group and SAGE publications,
where she worked across a range of science, social science and
humanities titles.
Impact of Social Sciences – Applied Altmetrics: How university presses, academic publishing services and institutional repositories benefit.
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