Micah Altman
Research Scientist, Center for Research in Equitable and Open Scholarship
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
There is evidence that scholarly processes have bias and create barriers to inclusion; more openness in scholarly communication is needed. Progress towards a better scholarly ecosystem requires standard, reliable measures of the desired attributes of a better system. MIT Libraries Center for Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS) is engaged in an IMLS-supported three-year project to develop open, reliable, standardized indicators that go beyond measures of “overall impact” to advance the understanding of who is, and who is not, participating in open scholarship. This project aims to integrate open data on scholarly communications, web and social media mining, and community-based tracking modules, in order to produce standardized indicators that describe the volume and types of open science output systematically over time. These indicators will support the evaluation of large-scale interventions, benchmark comparisons, and monitor the health of the scholarly information ecosystem over time. In this briefing, we will describe the project plans and preliminary results from pilot research.
