About the Project

Overview

Partners: The UC3 group at the California Digital Library, PLOS, and NCEAS from the DataONE federation

Timeline: 1 Oct 2014 - 1 Oct 2015

Project Goal

We propose to design and develop metrics that track and measure data use, “data-level metrics” (DLM). DLM are a multi-dimensional suite of indicators, measuring the broad range of activity surrounding the reach and use of data as a research output. We will investigate the validity and feasibility of the metrics by collecting them and investigating how to best make use of the data harvested to power discovery and reporting of scholarly these scholarly outputs.

Sharing data is time consuming and researchers need incentives for undertaking the extra work. Metrics for data will provide feedback on data usage, views, and impact that will help encourage researchers to share their data. This project will explore and test the metrics needed to capture activity surrounding research data.

The DLM pilot will build from the successful open source Article-Level Metrics community project, Lagotto, originally started by PLOS in 2009. ALM provide a view into the activity surrounding an article after publication, across a broad spectrum of ways in which research is disseminated and used (e.g., viewed, shared, discussed, cited, and recommended, etc.)

About the Project Partners

PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization founded to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication.

Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is an NSF DataNet project which is developing a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data. DataONE development for the MDC project will be conducted by NCEAS, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara. NCEAS operates one of the Coordinating Nodes for DataONE and has helped develop all of the infrastructure for the federation, and it operates the KNB Data Repository, which is a DataONE member repository.

The University of California Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library is a creative partnership bringing together the expertise and resources of the University of California. Together with the UC libraries, we provide high quality and cost-effective solutions that enable campus constituencies – museums, libraries, archives, academic departments, research units and individual researchers – to have direct control over the management, curation and preservation of the information resources underpinning their scholarly activities.