Make Data Count: Building a System to Support Recognition of Data as a First Class Research Output | Data Pub

"The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has made a 2-year, $747K award to the California Digital Library, DataCite and DataONE to support collection of usage and citation metrics for data objects. Building on pilot work, this award will result in the launch of a new service that will collate and expose data level metrics.

The impact of research has traditionally been measured by citations to journal publications: journal articles are the currency of scholarly research.  However, scholarly research is made up of a much larger and richer set of outputs beyond traditional publications, including research data. In order to track and report the reach of research data, methods for collecting metrics on complex research data are needed.  In this way, data can receive the same credit and recognition that is assigned to journal articles.

'Recognition of data as valuable output from the research process is increasing and this project will greatly enhance awareness around the value of data and enable researchers to gain credit for the creation and publication of data' – Ed Pentz, Crossref.

This project will work with the community to create a clear set of guidelines on how to define data usage. In addition, the project will develop a central hub for the collection of data level metrics. These metrics will include data views, downloads, citations, saves, social media mentions, and will be exposed through customized user interfaces deployed at partner organizations. Working in an open source environment, and including extensive user experience testing and community engagement, the products of this project will be available to data repositories, libraries and other organizations to deploy within their own environment, serving their communities of data authors."