Now is the time to update our understanding of scientific impact in light of open scholarship | Impact of Social Sciences

Sascha Friesike, Benedikt Fecher and Gert. G. Wagner outline three systemic shifts in scholarly communication that render traditional bibliometric measures of impact outdated and call for a renewed debate on how we understand and measure research impact. New digital research infrastructures and the advent of online distribution channels are changing the realities of scientific knowledge creation and dissemination. Yet, the measurement of scientific impact that funders, policy makers, and research organizations perpetuate fails to sufficiently recognize these developments. This situation leaves many researchers stranded as evaluation criteria are often at odds with the reality of knowledge creation and good scientific practice. We argue that a debate is urgently needed to redefine what constitutes scientific impact in light of open scholarship. Open scholarship being scholarship that makes best use of digital technology to make research more efficient, reproducible, and accessible. To this end, we present four ongoing systemic shifts in scholarly practice, which common impact measures fail to recognize.