NISO Project Brings Scientific Evaluation Into the 21st Century With Altmetrics: NewsBreaks

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced a new, two-part project on June 20 “to study, propose, and develop community-based standards or recommended practices in the field of alternative metrics.” The two-part project is funded by a $207,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and is expected to take 2 years to complete. “Citation analysis lacks ways to measure the newer and more prevalent ways that articles generate impact such as through social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook, or blogs,” according to Nettie Lagace, NISO’s associate director for programs, who explains some details in the announcement. “Additionally, new forms of scholarly outputs, such as datasets, software tools, algorithms, or molecular structures are now commonplace, but they are not easily—if at all—assessed by traditional citation metrics. These are two among the many concerns the growing movement around altmetrics is trying to address.” The Sloan Foundation’s Joshua M. Greenberg notes in the release that “[w]ith its long history of crafting just such standards, NISO is uniquely positioned to help take altmetrics to the next level.”