Open Science & Altmetrics Monthly Roundup (October 2014)

Open Access Week dominated Open Science conversation this month, along with interesting UK debates on metrics and several valuable studies being released. Read on for more on all of it!

UK debates use of metrics in research evaluation

Academia’s biggest proponents and critics of altmetrics descended on the University of Sussex on October 7 for the event, “In Metrics We Trust?”.

Some of the most interesting finds shared at the meeting?

  • REF peer reviewers admitted they spend less than 15 minutes reviewing papers for quality, due to the sheer volume of products that need evaluation,

  • Departmental h-indices tend to correlate with REF/RAE evaluations, leading some to argue that time and money could be saved by replacing future REF exercises with metrics, and

  • Leading bibliometrics researchers disagree on whether altmetrics could be used for evaluation. Some said they cannot, no matter what; others said that they can, because altmetrics measure different impacts than citations measure.

The meeting ended with no clear answer as to whether metrics are definitely right (or wrong) for use in the next REF. We’ll have to wait for the HEFCEmetric committee’s recommendations when they issue their report in June.

Until then, check out the full debate in our Storify of the event, as well as Ernesto Priego’s archive of related tweets.

OA Week 2014 recap

The Impactstory team is still recovering from Open Access Week 2014, which saw us talking to over 100 researchers and librarians in 9 countries over 5 days. A full recap of our talks can be found on the Impactstory blog, along with “The Right Metrics for Generation Open: a Guide to getting credit for Open Science”, based on our most popular webinar from the week.

Interest in Open Access and Open Science has risen over the past year, making this year’s Open Access Week successful according to all reports. As Heather Morrison has documented on her blog, the past year has seen an increase in the availability OA documents and data–ArXiv.org alone has grown by 11%!

Other altmetrics & Open Science news

Did we miss anything?

What was your favorite event or new study released this month? Share it in the comments below, or on Twitter (you can find us @Impactstory).

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