September 2014 saw Elsevier staking its claim in altmetrics research, one scientist’s calculations of the “opportunity cost” of practicing Open Science, and a whole lot more. Read on!

Hundreds attend 1am:London Conference

PLOS’s Jennifer Lin presents at 1am:London (photo courtesy of Mary Ann Zimmerman)

Researchers, administrators, and librarians from around the world convened in London on September 25 and 26 to debate and discover at 1am:London, a conference devoted exclusively to altmetrics.

Some highlights: Sarah Callaghan (British Atmospheric Data Centre), Salvatore Mele (CERN) and Daniel Katz (NSF) discussed the challenges of tracking impacts for data and software; Dan O’Connor (Wellcome Trust) outlined the ethical implications of performing altmetrics research on social media, and our Director of Marketing & Research, Stacy Konkiel, shared where Impactstory has been in the past year, and where we’re headed in the next (check out her slides here).

As you might expect, 1am:London got a lot of social media coverage! Check out the Twitter archive here, watch videos of all the sessions here, and read recaps of the entire meeting over on the conference blog.

Elsevier announces increased focus on altmetrics

Elsevier is pledging increased organizational support for altmetrics research initiatives across the company in the coming year. According to their Editors Update newsletter, the publishing monolith will begin experimenting with the display of Altmetric.com data on journal websites. (Likely related: this altmetrics usability study, for which Elsevier is offering participants $100USD honorariums; sign up here to participate.) The company also recently announced that Mendeley will soon integrate readership data into authors’ dashboards.

NISO survey results reveal more concern with definitions than gaming

The American information standards organization, NISO, surveyed researchers to determine the most important “next steps” for altmetrics standards and definitions development. Interestingly, one of the most common concerns related to the use of altmetrics in assessment–gaming–ranked lower than setting definitions. Promoting the use of persistent identifiers and determining the types of research outputs that are best to track altmetrics for also ranked highly. Check out the full results over on the NISO site.

Other Open Science & Altmetrics news

• California becomes first US state to pass an Open Access bill: The California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB609) was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in late September, making California the first state in the nation to mandate Open Access for state-funded research. Specifically, the bill requires researchers funded by the CA Department of Public Health to make copies of resulting articles available in a publicly accessible online database. Let’s hope the saying, “As Calfornia goes, so goes the nation” proves true with respect to Open Access! Read more about the bill and related news coverage on the SPARC website.

• Nature Communications is going 100% Open Access: the third-most cited multidisciplinary journal in the world will go fully Open Access in October 2014. Scientists around the world cheered the news on Twitter, noting that Nature Communications will offer CC-BY as the default license for articles. Read more over on Wired UK.

• “Science” track proposals announced for Mozilla Festival 2014: The proposals include killer Open Science events like “Open Science Badges for Contributorship,” “Curriculum Mapping for Open Science,” and “Intro to IPython Notebook.” The Festival will occur in London on October 24-26. To see the full list of proposed Science sessions and to register, visit the Mozilla Festival website.

• Impactstory launches new features, sleek new look: last month, we unveiled cool new functionalities for Impactstory profiles, including the ability to add new publications to your profile just by sending an email. The redesigned site also better showcases the works and metrics you’re most proud of, with new “Selected Works” and “Key Metrics” sections on your profile’s homepage. Check out our blog for more information, or login to your Impactstory profile to discover our new look.

• Research uncovers a new public impact altmetrics flavor–“good for teaching”: bibliometrician Lutz Bornmann has shown that papers tagged on F1000 as being “good for teaching” tend to have higher instances of Facebook and Twitter metrics–types of metrics long assumed to relate more to “public” impacts. Read the full study on ArXiv.

• PLOS Labs announces Citation Hackathon: citations aren’t as good as they could be: they lack the structure needed to be machine-readable, making them less-than-useful for web-native publishing and citation tracking. PLOS is working to change that. Their San Francisco-based hackathon will happen on Saturday, October 18. Visit the PLOS Labs website for more information.

• What’s the opportunity cost of Open Science? According to Emilio Bruna, it’s 35 hours and $690 dollars. In a recent blog post, Bruna calculates the cost–both in manhours and cash–of making his research data, code, and papers Open Access. Read his full account on the Bruna Lab blog.

What was your favorite Open Science or altmetrics happening from September?

We couldn’t cover everything in this roundup. Share your news in the comments below!