This grant supports efforts to increase adoption of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), an enterprising new system that aims to provide a unique, persistent identifier to every researcher on the planet, allowing scholars, content aggregators, and the public to easily pull together research associated with that researcher’s ID, wherever it is published, however the author’s name appears. Funds from this grant will support expansion of ORCID through a small grant competition that challenges universities, professional societies, and other academic institutions to implement ORCID identifiers into existing repository, learning management, academic profile, conference management, and other technology platforms. Ten winners will be chosen from grant applicants based on the quality of the plans submitted and the likelihood that their work will lower barriers to ORCID adoption by peers.

One of the goals of Sloan’s Scholarly Communication program is to better facilitate the discovery and review of research products available on the Internet. Since many of these materials (from working papers to datasets) do not appear in conventional journals, a small but growing community has begun to explore the idea of alternative metrics of value and impact, ranging from downloads and inclusion in personal reference manager databases to social media references.Funds from this grant support the continued development of ImpactStory, an innovative altmetrics platform that aggregates citations and other mentions of academic scholarship on the Internet, including references from arXiv, Mendeley, PLOS, Dryad, PubMed and Scopus, as well as Facebook, Vimeo, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Grant funds support development of the platform and the creation and implementation of a long term institutional sustainability plan.

While there are currently many different ways to find out how much a given article or book has been cited, there is no way to know how many times it has appeared on a syllabus, and the impact of scholarly research in the classroom is a blind spot for which we have no accessible data. One could, for example, imagine a “syllabus count” alongside a citation count, not just for articles and books, but also for all sorts of other resources from datasets to websites. Beyond individual impact, a broad, computable archive of syllabi could be a valuable resource for research on the evolution of disciplines.This grant supports efforts by Joe Karaganis of the American Assembly to develop just such a resource.  Karaganis has assembled a diverse team of data providers, application designers and other collaborators to coordinate a planning and prototyping process aimed at bringing a robust syllabus archive to life.

Altmetrics aggregators who draw together diverse sources of data about the use of research products face a fundamental challenge: the myriad dissemination and archival platforms used by academics can make it difficult (if not impossible) to get consistent and normalized access to the data they need. While a general consensus is emerging among online publishers and repositories of articles, datasets, software, and other materials that such impact data could be valuable to their users, no clear standards exist governing how organizations should make that data accessible to others.This grant funds efforts by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) to lead a two-year standard-setting process for altmetrics data. NISO will begin by hosting a series of scoping meetings over the first 12 months of the grant, bringing stakeholders together to map the most salient sources of data based on demand from altmetrics services as well as the researchers, funders, and deans that represent altmetrics end-users. After synthesizing those findings in a white paper for wide distribution, NISO will shift into a formal standards-setting process targeting the most pressing use cases, ultimately producing standard data exchange formats for adoption by those who produce and consume altmetrics data.