Kicking off Love Data Week 2018, the Make Data Count (MDC) team is pleased to announce that the first iteration of our Code of Practice for Research Data Usage Metrics Release 1 has now been posted as a preprint.
Beginning in June, members from the MDC team and COUNTER began conversations around what a standard for data usage metrics may look like. By September we were able to release an initial draft outline for community feedback. Comments from the community and further drafting spurred discussions around how data are different than articles and where the code of practice for data needed to deviate from the COUNTER Code of Practice Release 5.
Our first release has been posted as a preprint so that we can continue to receive community feedback and input. This Code of Practice will act as the framework for the MDC project goals of having comparable data usage metrics across the repository landscape. As we begin to implement this standard in our own (CDL and DataONE) data repositories we will be adapting the Code of Practice based on our experiences. We hope that repositories interested in being early adopters of displaying standardized data level metrics in accordance with this recommendation will also contribute to future iterations of the code of practice.
We look forward to utilizing this first release as a starting point for community discussion around data level metrics, and urge anyone interested to get in touch with us or join our RDA Data Usage Metrics Working Group.
