For the past few months, we have worked to garner interest and facilitate discussion about data usage metrics within the community. Internally, we are working to drive development toward comparable, standardized data usage metrics and data citations on repository interfaces. We are excited to share our progress and we want to thank those who have given us feedback or have gotten involved along the way!
December, 2017
Early in December we had a series of webinars for the DataONE and NISO communities. Although the recordings are not available, the discussions between the MDC team and institutions and repository communities were engaging and productive. Thank you to those who joined us. Slides for these webinars can be found here.
During the week of webinars we also had DataONE’s Matt Jones at AGU talking on the “Receiving Credit Where It’s Due” panel about the MDC project.
January, 2018
In the new year we gathered an Advisory Group of community members that have expertise in driving adoption of open data, open source, and open access initiatives. Our first Advisory Group meeting proved to be energizing for our MDC team as we brainstormed our best path towards mass adoption, various initiatives we should be working in conjunction with, and projects that could expand on the MDC work.
We are also pleased to report that we have launched an RDA Working Group “Data Usage Metrics” led by CDL’s Daniella Lowenberg, DataONE’s Dave Vieglais, and Scopus Product Manager Eleonora Presani. We will be at the RDA11 Berlin Meeting and would love for you to join the group and help us spread the word. The focus will be research data usage metrics implementation, adoption strategies, and future metrics to be considered.
Closing out January, members from MDC met at PIDapalooza and had a meeting focused on mapping implementation of log processing in the CDL Dash Data Publication platform and DataONE repositories.
At the conference we did a brief presentation on the progress of Make Data Count and spent much of our session time having a discussion about what constitutes “usage metrics”. Questions arose around how stakeholders may not differ in how they would benefit from data usage metrics (i.e. institutions versus funders), how to understand impact from usage metrics, and how citations are indicators of usage.
What’s in store for the rest of winter?
Instead of hibernating, we have one major priority: implementation in the Dash and DataONE repositories. Coordinating efforts between the building of an open and public hub (hosted at DataCite) and implementation in the repositories, we are documenting our questions, answers, and experiences to develop a “how-to” guide for the repository community. We are continually looking for early adopter repositories that would like to log process and display standardized data usage metrics and citations. Please get in touch with us if your repository would like to be a part of this. To follow on our implementation work, check out our public Github.
And lastly, we have been working to formalize our recommendation for research data usage metrics. Stay tuned next week for the release of our COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data preprint.
