New Opportunities for Repositories in the Age of Altmetrics

For institutional repositories, alternative metrics reflecting online activity present valuable indicators of interest in their holdings that can supplement traditional usage statistics. A variable mix of built-in metrics is available through popular repository platforms: Digital Commons, DSpace and EPrints. These may include download counts at the collection and/or item level, search terms, total and unique visitors, page views and social media and bookmarking metrics; additional data may be available with special plug-ins. Data provide different types of information valuable for repository managers, university administrators and authors. They can reflect both scholarly and popular impact, show readership, reflect an institution's output, justify tenure and promotion and indicate direction for collection management. Practical considerations for implementing altmetrics include service costs, technical support, platform integration and user interest. Altmetrics should not be used for author ranking or comparison, and altmetrics sources should be regularly reevaluated for relevance

Soft peer review: social software and distributed scientific evaluation

The debate on the prospects of peer-review in the Internet age and the increasing criticism leveled against the dominant role of impact factor indicators are calling for new measurable criteria to assess scientific quality. Usage-based metrics offer a new avenue to scientific quality assessment but face the same risks as first generation search engines that used unreliable metrics (such as raw traffic data) to estimate content quality. In this article I analyze the contribution that social bookmarking systems can provide to the problem of usage-based metrics for scientific evaluation. I suggest that collaboratively aggregated metadata may help fill the gap between traditional citation-based criteria and raw usage factors. I submit that bottom-up, distributed evaluation models such as those afforded by social bookmarking will challenge more traditional quality assessment models in terms of coverage, efficiency and scalability. Services aggregating user-related quality indicators for online scientific content will come to occupy a key function in the scholarly communication system

Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility

OpenUCT published Academics' online presence guidelines: A four step guide to taking control of your visibility in 2012

Annotation evolution: how Web 2.0 technologies are enabling a change in annotation practice

Are Web 2.0 tools and technologies changing how and why scholars annotate their research sources? We begin to answer this question by assessing current technology and tools that support new functions for one of the most common scholarly research activity: taking notes. The results suggest a new approach to personalized information retrieval.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe