Plum Analytics Maps Success in Open Access Scholarship

“Another trendy term has arrived—altmetrics, a contraction of the phrase ‘alternative metrics’ ... A new small startup, Plum Analytics, has moved into the altmetrics field. It offers universities and other research institutions a way to track how researchers on staff have fared in the open access (OA) milieu. Where and how often have what they have written been referred to? What about the same information for co-authors, even ones not working at the client institution? What venues produce the best results for spreading the word? The motto and mission of the new company is ‘making research more assessable and accessible...‘ The first client for Plum Analytics services is the University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS), the 22nd largest academic library system in North America. The University of Pittsburgh will supply a list of its researchers with profiles that should include lists of their writings and publications. In turn, Plum will enhance the profiles to build a directory that correlates the list with ‘usage and interaction metrics’ from OA sources, social networks, data repositories, blogs, and others. According to Rush Miller, university librarian and director at the University of Pittsburgh, the Plum service will “work in tandem with traditional measures to assess the impact of Pitt research in non-traditional venues. These days scholars are no longer waiting to publish their research in formal publications. They’re using Twitter, social networks, blogs, etc. to publish research and thoughts as they occur. Plum will match Pitt’s researchers to their own database.” Miller also indicated that the University of Pittsburgh is committed to OA—publishing about 20 OA journals itself. It also uses portions of the money made to fund payment of author fees to other high-quality OA journals (e.g., in the sadly underfunded humanities). Buschman approved combining traditional measures with altmetrics. He pointed out that with the rise of OA and other forms of digital scholarly communication, traditional citation measures had become “a lagging indicator.” The delay factor in getting content into publication and then the delay in getting the citing publications published makes the traditional approach more appropriate for measuring past years than the latest research, according to Buschman. And in more and more fields, born digital content, including datasets for example, is simply hard to track accurately using traditional techniques. The Plum Research Directory models the affiliations and research outputs of researchers in a flexible, extensible manner. Plum maps who follows or engages with the researcher and/or their work, such as co-authors. Plum then crawls the web, social networks, and university-hosted data repositories to collect and calculate metrics about the usage of each artifact. Plum’s Researcher Graph uses RDF, the same data model that underlies the semantic web. The social networks currently tracked by Plum are Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Buschman said, “If scholarly social networks appear, we are open to adding anything.” He indicated that LinkedIn would also be covered though its profiles did not accommodate researcher information as well as some other services. Data repositories tapped at present include all Dryad and Figshare ones. Buschman also expects Plum’s products to help researchers learn how best to promote their research. For example, they can track how effectively different methods of communication or outlets reach particular collegial communities...”