Altmetrics and open access: a measure of public interest | Australian Open Access Support Group

"Researchers, research managers and publishers are increasingly required to factor into their policies and practices the conditions by which publicly funded research must be made publicly available. But in the struggle for competitive funding, how can researchers provide tangible evidence that their outputs have not only been made publicly available, but that the public is using them? Or how can they demonstrate that their research outputs have reached and influenced those whose tax dollars have helped fund the research?  The number of raw citations per paper or an aggregate number, such as the h-index, are indicators of scholarly impact, in that they reveal the attribution of credit in scholarly works to prior scholarship. This attribution is normally given by scholars in peer-reviewed journals, and harvested by citation databases. But they do not provide an indication of public reach and influence. Traditional metrics also do not provide an indication of impact for non-traditional research outputs, such as datasets or creative productions, or of non-journal publications, such as books and media coverage.  Public impact for all types of research outputs could always be communicated as narrative or case studies. These forms of evidence can be extremely useful, perhaps even necessary, in building a case of past impact as an argument for future funding. However, impact narratives and case studies require sources of evidence to support their impact claims. An example of how this can be achieved is in the guidelines for completion of case studies in the recent Australian Technology Network  of universities (ATN)  / Group of Eight (Go8) Excellence in Innovation in Australia impact assessment trial ... One promising source of evidence is the new suite of alternative metrics or altmetrics that have been developed to gauge the academic and public impact of digital scholarship, that is, any scholarly output that has a digital identifier or online location and that is accessible by the web-public ... Altmetrics (or alternative metrics) was a term aptly coined in a tweet by Jason Priem (co-founder of ImpactStory). Altmetrics measure the number of times a research output gets cited, tweeted about, liked, shared, bookmarked, viewed, downloaded, mentioned, favourited, reviewed, or discussed. It harvests these numbers from a wide variety of open source web services that count such instances, including open access journal platforms, scholarly citation databases, web-based research sharing services, and social media.  The numbers are harvested almost in real time, providing researchers with fast evidence that their research has made an impact or generated a conversation in the public forum. Altmetrics are quantitative indicators of public reach and influence ..."