NISO Releases Draft Altmetrics Recommended Practices on Data Metrics, Alternative Outputs, and Persistent Identifiers

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) seeks comments on three draft documents related to Altmetrics: NISO RP-25-201x-2A, Alternative Outputs in Scholarly Communications: Data Metrics; NISO RP-25-201x-2B, Persistent Identifiers in Scholarly Communications; and NISO RP-25-201x-2C, Alternative Outputs in Scholarly Communications.

These documents are the latest outputs from NISO's Altmetrics Initiative, a project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The project aims to address limitations and gaps that may hinder the adoption of altmetrics, an expansion of tools available for measuring scholarly impact of research in the knowledge environment. Other working groups participating in the project have released drafts on Altmetrics Definitions and Use Cases and a Code of Conduct for Provider Data Quality.

NISO RP-25-201x-2A, Alternative Outputs in Scholarly Communications: Data Metricsemphasizes the necessity for data to be citable and its use to be measurable.The second two draft documents, NISO RP-25-201x-2B, Persistent Identifiers in Scholarly Communications and NISO RP-25-201x-2C, Alternative Outputs in Scholarly Communications, are largely comprised of tables that offer overviews of important aspects of scientific communication today.

The Persistent Identifiers document recognizes that DOIs are only one type of identifier among the many available to researchers today, and describes the importance of related efforts in a variety of scholarly domains to identify research outputs of various types. The authors encourage those community members working to support open science and interoperability to use persistent identifiers to measure, evaluate, and report on the effectiveness of research infrastructure and communication whenever possible.

NISO RP-25-201x-2C, Alternative Outputs in Scholarly Communication offers a current list of nontraditional research outputs, displaying the rich array of scholarly products that are created during the research process. The included table provides brief descriptions of the various kinds of materials being produced, from new cell lines to W3C standards; notes examples of known current efforts and by whom these are being undertaken; and offers relevant links.

The draft Recommended Practices are open for public comment through June 11, 2016. To download the drafts or submit online comments, visit the NISO Altmetrics Initiative web page at http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/altmetrics_initiative/.