Extending and measuring the reach and impact of research output: #openaccess, social media and "alternative metrics"

On the modern web, research can very easily be disseminated amongst communities of researchers and interested lay people, via social media for example and potential reach and impact is immediately extended if that research is freely accessible on the open web rather than restricted by subscription access. In the UK, the Finch report (2012) and HEFCE’s “Policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework” (2013) have precipitated dramatic developments in both “green” and “gold” models of OA; from April 2016, in order to be eligible for REF, HEFCE will require authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts to be deposited in a repository on acceptance for publication while commercial academic publishers are developing hybrid business models and, in some cases, extending embargo periods for repository deposit. In this environment, article level metrics are increasingly important as a more direct proxy for impact than Journal Impact Factor (JIF), and evidence suggests that OA can increase traditional citations while developments in alternative or “altmetrics” are enabling online social activity around research to be recorded and measured. Meanwhile, online research infrastructure, comprising commercial services like Mendeley, Figshare and ResearchGate as well as Institutional Repositories, are developing apace with major initiatives like the COnnecting REpositories (CORE) OA aggregator at the Open University and IRUS-UK (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) run by Mimas providing standardised COUNTER compliant repository download statistics. This session will explore these various tools and services and demonstrate how they can be leveraged to capitalise on the potential of OA at your institution.