Open Metrics Require Open Infrastructure

"Today, Zenodo announced their intentions to remove the altmetrics.com badges from their landing pages–and we couldn’t be more energized by their commitment to open infrastructure, supporting their mission to make scientific information open and free. “We strongly believe that metadata about records including citation data & other data used for computing metrics should be freely available without barriers” – Zenodo Leadership.... In light of emerging needs for metrics and our work at Make Data Count (MDC) to build open infrastructure for data metrics, we believe that it is necessary for corporations or entities that provide analytics and researcher tools to share the raw data sources behind their work. In short, if we trust these metrics enough to display on our websites or add to our CVs, then we should also demand that they be available for us to audit.... These principles are core to our mission to build the infrastructure for open data metrics. As emphasis shifts in scholarly communication toward “other research outputs” beyond the journal article, we believe it is important to build intentionally open infrastructure, not repeating mistakes made in the metrics systems developed for articles. We know that it is possible for the community to come together and develop the future of open metrics, in a non-prescriptive manner, and importantly built on completely open and reproducible infrastructure."