Institutional services and altmetrics as drivers for a cultural transition to open scholarship
Delivered at the 2:AM altmetrics conference (7th Oct 2015)
http://www.altmetricsconference.com/schedule/details.html#open-science
Video available:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZxcSmSdeMY
The causal effect to the impact of scholarly outputs disseminated under an open model may be mirrored in the statistical analysis provided by Altmetrics. In the wake of technological developments and funder expectations, we at Brunel University London have a longstanding commitment for open access to our research outputs, going back over ten years. A single campus, community focused institution, our services and systems been tailored to support our scholars and effect cultural change during the transition toward open scholarship.
I will talk about how the evolution of our systems deployment has led to a support network that facilitates University publishing for new, open forms of scholarly output and that enables the monitoring of traditional published outputs through green, gold or paywall distribution models. Our publishing systems include an Institutional Repository (IR) and FigShare Data Repository. Our Current Research Information System (CRIS) provides the mechanism to monitor publication trends across our entire portfolio.
We are beginning to see how the data we work with every day could be used to extend the discovery of our academics work and to promote the institutions reputation in this space. We curate a huge range of high quality metadata within our CRIS; keywords, subjects and themes to name but a few. We want to see better ways of using this data to select and promote our publications across the social sphere – ideally making use of and developing our existing local networks and the networks of our researchers, and I will speak to our progress in this area so far.
I will conclude by arguing that the clear, mutualistic relationship between the altmetrics and open science movements necessitates effective co-operation with local university services to bring about a smooth and swift transition for authors to the open scholarly model.
