Advancing data metrics in 2025!

DOI 10.60804/1nhk-qd72

We have many great activities planned for the coming year, collaborating with individuals and organizations that share our drive to advance responsible data metrics and data evaluation.

Here is a preview of what we’ll be doing in 2025:

1. Work even more closely with institutions

Universities play a key role in advancing open research practices, and many institutions are already considering how to incorporate data into their processes. We want to support adoption of data metrics and data evaluation at institutions and so we’ve partnered with HELIOS Open to launch the ‘Implementing data evaluation in academia’ Working Group. This group will develop practical resources that support implementation of data evaluation as part of institutional hiring, review, promotion, and tenure.

Make Data Count has been selected as part of the next cycle of SCOSS funding, this provides a great opportunity for us to engage with libraries and institutions and learn more about their data-evaluation needs. 

2. Scale data citations

With the ultimate goal to make it easier for the community to access data citations openly and at scale, we’ll be advancing our work on the Data Citation Corpus. This year we’ll incorporate additional data sources into the Corpus, and pursue our work to increase its coverage, both in number of citations and the metadata available for citation records.

3. Expand our view of data usage

We believe that data metrics should capture the variety of ways in which users interact with datasets. We will work to broaden implementation of the usage tracker, so that we can expand the normalized counts of data views and downloads available to the community. There are additional ways in which data are accessed and used, and we will be engaging with the community to identify additional uses that we should be developing practices and tools for.

4. Contextualize data usage

In order to address the community’s diverse data-evaluation needs, we need to capture information about the nature of each use in addition to measuring whether data use has taken place. To tackle this, we are co-leading the FORCE11 ‘Data usage typologies’ Working Group that will focus on developing a common typology of data uses, so that different actors in the data ecosystem can consistently collect and compare the diverse types of usage for datasets, and inform how to capture this information in the dataset metadata.

5. Build standards

We will pursue ongoing collaborations with community groups and organizations to build on the existing practices and continue to develop standards for the evaluation of data usage. In 2025, we’ll be working with COUNTER to complete the update to the Code of Practice for Research Data, and will pursue our engagement with the Open Science Monitoring Initiative (OSMI).