Many publishers and funders have implemented open data policies in efforts to make research more transparent and re-usable. These policies also aim to support data, software, and other research objects as valuable output of the research process. To begin to assess impact and give credit to researchers for sharing research objects, however, the community needs to take additional steps to promote standardized measurement of research object usage and proper citation. This means different things for different stakeholders: researchers need to be informed on how and why research object citations should be included in articles and other publications, publishers need to promote and index research object citations, repositories need to standardize and display research object usage information, and institutions need to value these metrics.
Several stakeholders have begun improving capabilities for tracking and exposing research object usage metrics. For example, Make Data Count highlights the value of research data by providing the infrastructure for repositories to display data usage and citation metrics. The project has worked with COUNTER to develop a Code of Practice to enable standardization and has also developed mechanisms for repositories to expose data usage metrics, including implementation examples from California Digital Library, the Arctic Data Center, and DataONE. In this session, we will hear 1) how repositories are currently tracking research object citations, and 2) how the Make Data Count project and other efforts can help these repositories standardize their reporting approach to support accurate representation of the value of research objects.
Session recording here.
