NISO's Altmetrics Initiative, a presentation by Nettie Lagace for ICIS: Innovating Communication in Scholarship meeting at UC Davis February 13-14, 2014

1. NISO’s Altmetrics Initiative
Nettie Lagace (@abugseye)
ICIS Meeting, UC Davis
February 14, 2014

2. What is NISO?
• Non-profit industry trade association accredited by ANSI
with 150+ members
• Mission of developing and maintaining standards related to
information, documentation, discovery and distribution of
published materials and media
• Represent US interests to ISO TC46 (Information and
Documentation) and also serve as Secretariat for ISO
TC46/SC 9 (Identification and Description)
• Responsible for standards like ISSN, DOI, Dublin Core
metadata, DAISY digital talking books, OpenURL, SIP, NCIP,
MARC records and ISBN (indirectly)
• Volunteer driven organization: 400+ spread out across the
world

3. Premise of “Standards”
• Consensus standards created by a community
with various stakeholders
• Trust
• Leading to broader acceptance
• Standards as plumbing
• Standards facilitate trade, commerce and
innovation
• Standards reduce costs
• Standards support better communication and
interoperability across systems

4. ANSI Standards
• Openness, lack of dominance, balance =
everyone affected has a voice
• Notifications, consideration of views and
objections
• Consensus votes and appeals
• ANSI patent policy, commercial terms and
conditions
• Publication and maintenance
• Credible & have Integrity

5. The Altmetrics Project
• Came out of breakout session at (ACM)
altmetrics12 meeting in Chicago, June 2012
• Funded by grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• Premise of grant award: To help facilitate the
adoption of altmetrics, development of
community consensus standards can help
address limitations and gaps that currently exist
• Identify and prioritize needs and requirements

6. Why worth funding?
• Scholarly assessment is critical to the overall
process
– Which projects get funded
– Who gets promoted and tenure
– Which publications are prominent
• Assessment has been based on citation since the
60s
• Today’s scholars multiple types of interactions
with scholarly content are not reflected
– Is “non-traditional” scholarly output important too?

7. Why worth funding?
• In order to move out of “pilot” and “proof-ofconcept” phases …
• Altmetrics must coalesce around commonly
understood definitions, calculations and data
sharing practices
• Altmetrics must be able to be audited
• Organizations who want to apply metrics will
need to understand them and ensure consistent
application and meaning across the community

8. What’s to Standardize?
• Field is too new … no existing practice to build on
• Standards should not be “invented” / codified
• A diversion from the real work that needs to be
done
– No community practice: administrators, granting orgs
etc. need accepted, trustworthy, verifiable info
– This project is not taking place overnight; two stages
for a reason
– NISO open process invites engagement from all

9. A few Questions about Altmetrics
• What gets measured (counted)?
• What are criteria for assessing quality of these
measures?
• How granular should the metrics be to enable
computation and analysis?
• What period(s) should the metrics cover?
• What technical infrastructure is necessary to
enable the exchange of the metrics data?

10. 2 Phases
• Phase 1: Hold meetings of stakeholders to define a
high-level list of issues
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October 2013, San Francisco
December 2013, Washington, DC
January 2014, Philadelphia
Public Webinars
White paper output, public presentations, public feedback
• Phase 2: Create Working Group within NISO structure,
to create recommended practice(s) and/or standard(s)
– Education/training efforts to ensure implementation
• Final report to Sloan due November 2015

11. niso.org
Linked from niso.org

12. Steering Committee
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Euan Adie, Altmetric
Amy Brand, Harvard University
Mike Buschman, Plum Analytics
Todd Carpenter, NISO
Martin Fenner, Public Library of Science (PLoS) (Chair)
Michael Habib, Reed Elsevier
Gregg Gordon, Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
William Gunn, Mendeley
Nettie Lagace, NISO
Jamie Liu, American Chemical Society (ACS)
Heather Piwowar, ImpactStory
John Sack, HighWire Press
Peter Shepherd, Project Counter
Christine Stohn, Ex Libris
Greg Tananbaum, SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)

13. Meeting Format
• Livestreamed (video recordings now available)
• Morning: lightning talks, post-it brainstorming
• Afternoon: discussion groups
– Business and use cases
– Qualitative/quantitative
– Quality and data science
– Data integrity
– Definitions
– Future proofing

14. Next Steps (Phase 1)
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Review and process all input from meetings
Additional 1-on-1 interviews
Community input via niso.ideascale.com
Preparation of white paper
Public webinar(s) to discuss draft white paper
White paper/work proposal finalized; vetted and
approved by NISO leadership and members
• Phase 2 to begin ~September 2014

15. Thank you!
nlagace@niso.org
@abugseye
http://www.niso.org