“So, what’s a good number?” – Altmetric

“ ... 'What are we supposed to do with this?' No, this comment wasn’t from someone who’d never heard of altmetrics before. This was from an altmetrics afficionado who called a meeting with me to show how his Altmetric scores rocketed after persuading his publisher to make his papers open access. He was used to donuts – he knew what they meant: they helped him analyse the reach of individual papers. It was just not immediately obvious to him why we would want to aggregate all of Loughborough’s data together. Could there be some sinister ulterior motive? In actual fact the opposite is true: Loughborough University is keen to work with academics to better understand the meaning and application of altmetrics institutionally. Communicating this will be key to overcoming any suspicions that Altmetric Explorer will become another set of management statistics ..."