Caroline Sutton discusses opportunities and challenges for social researchers in the digital environment. She notes that how research and its impact are evaluated will likely change significantly in the next five years. Researchers should consider what good indicators of various types of impact exist and how they could be measured with more granularity. In the meantime, researchers need a strategic approach to ensure their work has impact in this changing evaluation landscape.

1. Research outputs &
impact in the digital
environment:
opportunities and challenges for the
social researcher
Caroline Sutton
Publisher, Co-Action Publishing
President, Open Access Scholarly Publisher’s Association
(OASPA)
SoRAD meeting
14-15 June 2012, Stockholm

2. A bit about Co-Action Publishing
 Established as Swedish limited liability company in
2007 by three former executives from academic
publishing industry
 Founding Member Open Access Scholarly
Publishers Association, OASPA, current President
 Publish journals across disciplines, including Social
Sciences and the Humanities, but primarily medicine
 30 fully-open access journals currently in portfolio

3. www.ijqhw.net
www.vulnerablegroupsandinclusion.net
Looking for a guest editor for a thematic
cluster on Recovering drug addicts and
inclusion.

4. Image by Bernd Sauerwein, accessed via Wikimedia,
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Planungsliterat
ur.JPG

5. www.ihop-net.org

6. OPEN ACCESS
= Free Access + Re-use

7. Creative Commons
Licenses
Most common:
 Attribution 3.0
(CCBY or CCAL)
 Attribution-
Noncommercial
3.0
(CCBY-NC)
8/16/2012

8. Universe of a Subscription Journal
Researchers Access only for
those who have a
subscription – for
Food & Nutrition
Research, approx.
700-800 (majority
society members)
Corporate Biotech
Food Producers
Nutraceuticals, Gene mod techniques,
(Nestlé, Unilever, Kraft)
Additives
8/16/2012

9. Universe of the OA Journal
Researchers from
Researchers related fields
Healthcare Workers –
esp Physicians &
Nutritionists
Nutrition
advocates
Related
professions
General citizens
interested in their
Industries own nutrition
with links
Corporate Biotech
Food Producers
Nutraceuticals, Gene mod techniques,
(Nestlé, Unilever, Kraft)
Additives
Print and online
magazines
Pharmaceutical Co Gov’t agencies &
(e.g. Novartis Medical Nutrition) policy-makers
8/16/2012

10. Usage Increased
During first six months:
 Over 42 000 full text article requests
 Over 32 000 full pages viewed by over 6 000 different
visitors to the website
Visitors were from 120 different countries while
subscriptions had been from 14 countries
After three years:
 5-6000 visitors per month
 10 000- 17000 downloads per month
 Visitors from 190 countries, with the US accounting for
20% of traffic.
 Submissions are up, citations are up (Unofficial impact
calculation: 2.708)
 Over 2900 members on LinkedIn, over
1000 registered readers.

11. Understanding knowledge
as a network (vs. property)
Knowledge as an
infrastructure
”A social network diagram”, Screenshot taken
by Darwin Peacock, accessed through
Wikimedia; distributed under a CCL 3.0.

12. Think ’Google’, Think
’Max Strategy’
 Publisher’s platform
 Ebsco
 DOAJ
 Institutional or subject-based repository, or both
 Author’s website
 Mendeley +/or other reference management
systems
 PDF/link sent to colleagues
 Metadata
 And lots of other places!

16. Permanent Identifiers to
Reduce Ambiguity
DOIs (open URLs) for articles, data sets, other outputs.
CrossRef
www.crossref.org
Digital Author Identifiers:
ORCID: Open Researcher & Contributor ID
http://about.orcid.org/about
http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2010/11/20/orcid/
Capture information as metadata at time of submission

19. Understanding impact in
today’s world
Academic impact
Economic and societal impact
Instrumental
Conceptual
Capacity building
Can the Impact Factor measure this?

20. Article level metrics

21. Article level metrics
www.total-impact.org

22. Social bookmarking

25. Mega journals challenge pre-publication assessment

26. In a nutshell….
1. How your research and its impact are evaluated today will not be the
same in five years time.
2. What are good indicators of impact (along the various dimensions that
have been defined)? What can we measure? What should we be
measuring?
3. How should we be measuring them? What do they mean?
4. Measurements in future will allow for greater granularity.
5. In the meantime, what kind of strategy should you follow to ensure
impact?

27. THANK YOU!
Caroline.Sutton@co-action.net