The huge increase in scientific output is presenting scholars with a deluge of data.  There is growing concern that scholarly output may be swamping traditional mechanisms for both pre-publication filtering (e.g. peer review) and post-publication impact filtering (e.g. the Journal Impact Factor).

Increasing scholarly use of Web 2.0 tools like CiteULike, Mendeley, Twitter, and blogs presents an opportunity to create new filters.  Metrics based on a diverse set of social sources could yield broader, richer, and timelier assessments of current and potential scholarly impact.  Realizing this, many authors have begun to call for investigation of these metrics under the banner of “altmetrics.”  Specifically, altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship.

Despite the growing speculation and early exploratory investigation into the value of altmetrics, there remains little concrete, objective research into the properties of these metrics: their validity, their potential value and flaws, and their relationship to established measures. Nor has there been any large umbrella to bring these multiple approaches together.

Following on from a first successful workshop on altmetrics, this collection aims to provide a forum for the dissemination of innovative research on these metrics.

We seek high quality submissions that advance the understanding of the efficacy of altmetrics, addressing research areas including:

• Validated new metrics based on social media.

• Tracking science communication on the Web.

• Relation between traditional metrics and altmetrics including validation and correlation.

• The relationship between peer review and altmetrics.

• Evaluated tools for gathering, analyzing, or disseminating altmetrics.

Papers will be reviewed on a rolling basis in-line with PLoS ONE standard practices.

Please note that all submissions submitted before January 28^th, 2012 will be considered for the launch of the collection (expected spring 2012); submissions after this date will still be considered for the collection, but may not appear in the collection at launch.

Submission Guidelines

If you wish to submit your research to the Altmetrics: Tracking scholarly impact on the social Web Collection, please consider the following when preparing your manuscript:

- All articles must adhere to the PLoS ONE submission guidelines.

- Standard PLoS ONE policies and publication fees apply to all submissions.

- Submission to PLoS ONE as part of the Altmetrics Collection does not guarantee publication.

When you are ready to submit your manuscript to the collection, please log in to the PLoS ONE manuscript submission system and insert ‘Altmetrics’ in the relevant field to ensure the PLoS ONE staff are aware of your submission to the Collection.  Once you have registered, you can follow the steps for manuscript submission.

Please contact Lindsay King (lking@plos.org) if you would like further information about how to submit your research to the PLoS ONE Altmetrics Collection.

Organizers:

Paul Groth, VU University Amsterdam

Dario Taraborelli, Wikimedia Foundation

Jason Priem, UNC-Chapel Hill

About PLoS ONE

PLoS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication.  PLoS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline.

It provides:

• Open-access – freely accessible online, authors retain copyright
• Fast publication times
• Peer review by expert, practicing researchers
• Post-publication tools to indicate quality and impact
• Community-based dialogue on articles
• Worldwide media coverage
• PLoS ONE is published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit organization.

In addition, we also have the same functionality operating at the article level. The widget is able to display tweets about a particular article by looking for the article DOI appearing in an ‘unpacked’ URL. If there are no tweets for a particular article, it will not appear.

The paper, Inner Speech during Silent Reading Reflects the Reader’s Regional Accent, is a nice example of this widget in use.

We should point out that this handy widget has a few limitations.  For one, the widget isn’t able to store tweets for all eternity.  It will only be able to show recent tweets. Also, it isn’t connected to our Article Level Metrics …yet (we’re working on it though).

Otherwise, we think this widget will make a nice new addition to our site and will be a helpful way to see what our community is saying.

1. A conserved behavioral state barrier impedes transitions between anesthetic-induced unconsciousness and wakefulness: evidence for neural inertia. Friedman EB, et al. PLoS ONE. 2010; 5(7):e11903.
   F1000 article factor (FFa): 15
2. From sea to sea: Canada’s three oceans of biodiversity. Archambault P, et al. PLoS ONE. 2010; 5(8):e12182
   F1000 article factor (FFa): 10
3. Do seasons have an influence on the incidence of depression? The use of an internet search engine query data as a proxy of human affect. Yang AC, Huang NE, Peng CK, Tsai SJ. PLoS ONE. 2010; 5(10):e13728
   F1000 article factor (FFa): 10
4. Coordinated progression through two subtranscriptomes underlies the tachyzoite cycle of Toxoplasma gondii. Behnke MS, et al. PLoS ONE. 2010; 5(8):e12354
   F1000 article factor (FFa): 10
5. The protease inhibitor alpha-2-macroglobulin-like-1 is the p170 antigen recognized by paraneoplastic pemphigus autoantibodies in human. Schepens I, et al. PLoS ONE. 2010; 5(8):e12250
   F1000 article factor (FFa): 10

* Faculty of 1000 is a subscription-based service. You can access the rankings free of charge but will need a subscription to view the Faculty comments on all papers.

As you may be aware, as part of our ongoing article-level metrics program, we provide a downloadable Excel file for the entire dataset (3 Mb zipped, but 35 Mb when unzipped). The first such file was created when we launched the usage data (in September 2009) and we have just updated it with the latest data (with data correct up to January 31st 2010). Going forwards, we plan to update this spreadsheet every other month, starting in April.

The main changes with this latest version (other than containing a more recent dataset) are:

• The addition of the ‘missing’ usage data for all our articles.
  • We now have a complete usage dataset for all articles, going back to day of publication (previously some articles missed the usage data for their early years)
• The addition of data from researchblogging.org. Researchblogging.org are a blog aggregating service and we now include their data as part of the article-level metrics data set (as described in an earlier post)
• An update to the various  journal level summary tables

Some people have already started analysing our data and we encourage anyone who is interested to take this dataset and do their own analysis. Also be aware that the ‘live’ data for each article can be accessed by clicking on the link: “Download raw Metrics data as XML” which can be found at the bottom of each article’s Metrics tab.

Several people blogged about the meeting, and Brian Glanz provided an excellent running commentary for the entire day.

Courtesy of Microsoft Research, the full video coverage of all the talks are now online as follows: Session 1 (Microsoft Research; Cameron Neylon; Jean-Claude Bradley); Session 2 (Antony Williams; Peter Murray-Rust); Session 3 (Heather Joseph; Stephen Friend); and Session 4 (starring myself, in a warm up role for the keynote by John Wilbanks).You will need to install Silverlight to view the videos.

This was an excellent meeting, for which Microsoft and Science Commons deserve a lot of praise – I recommend the video coverage for anyone who couldnt be there.

Today we learned that by the end of this week PLoS ONE (in keeping with all other PLoS journals) will be indexed by the Web of Science – this is an important literature discovery tool that many people use and so we are pleased to be indexed. PLoS ONE is also indexed by a host of other services such as PubMed, MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus, Google Scholar, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), EMBASE, AGRICOLA, PsycINFO, Zoological Records, FSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts), GeoRef, and RefAware.

Initially, coverage in the Web of Science will include new PLoS ONE articles plus those published in 2008 and 2009, and will be expanded to the articles published in 2006 (when PLoS ONE was launched) and 2007 in the coming weeks. Inclusion in the Web of Science also means that in June 2010 PLoS ONE will receive journal-level citation data from Thomson Reuters including a 2- and 5-year Impact Factor and Eigenfactor metrics.

As we have previously indicated, PLoS believes that research articles are best assessed on their own merits, rather than on the basis of the journal (and its impact factor) where the work happens to be published. While we are happy that PLoS ONE articles will become more discoverable as a result of their inclusion in the Web of Science, we will continue to push forward with our Article-Level Metrics program.

Naturally, we understand that inclusion in the Web of Science is significant for many academics whose research output is still measured by traditional means. We hope that this news encourages even more scientists to publish their work in PLoS journals, to benefit from the article-level metrics that are provided for every PLoS article (for example, this PLoS ONE article), and to ensure that all interested users have open access to their research.

To commemorate our birthday, we’ve selected ten papers published in our inaugural release on December 20, all of which highlight some of the usage data made available on all PLoS papers earlier this year as part of our article-level metrics programme. This is how they have performed in the various metrics over the past three years:

A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments
Mel Slater, Angus Antley, Adam Davison, David Swapp, Christoph Guger, et al.

The Evolution of Mammalian Gene Families
Jeffery P. Demuth, Tijl De Bie, Jason E. Stajich, Nello Cristianini, Matthew W. Hahn

Mesenchymal Stem Cell-Mediated Functional Tooth Regeneration in Swine
Wataru Sonoyama, Yi Liu, Dianji Fang, Takayoshi Yamaza, Byoung-Moo Seo, et al.

Taxonomic Reliability of DNA Sequences in Public Sequence Databases: A Fungal Perspective
R. Henrik Nilsson, Martin Ryberg, Erik Kristiansson, Kessy Abarenkov, Karl-Henrik Larsson, Urmas Kõljalg

Sexual Selection and the Evolution of Brain Size in Primates
Michael A. Schillaci

Perceptual Learning of Motion Leads to Faster Flicker Perception
Aaron R. Seitz, Jose E. Nanez, Sr., Steve R. Holloway, Takeo Watanabe

Concentration of the Most-Cited Papers in the Scientific Literature: Analysis of Journal Ecosystems
John P. A. Ioannidis

A Systems Biology Strategy Reveals Biological Pathways and Plasma Biomarker Candidates for Potentially Toxic Statin-Induced Changes in Muscle
Reijo Laaksonen, Mikko Katajamaa, Hannu Päivä, Marko Sysi-Aho, Lilli Saarinen, et al.

Multilocus Sequence Typing Breathes Life into a Microbial Metagenome
Eshwar Mahenthiralingam, Adam Baldwin, Pavel Drevinek, Elke Vanlaere, Peter Vandamme, et al.

Depauperate Avifauna in Plantations Compared to Forests and Exurban Areas
David G. Haskell, Jonathan P. Evans, Neil W. Pelkey

Every interested author and user can now see how many times an article has been downloaded (split into HTML Pageviews, PDF and XML downloads and displayed in a month-by-month format); how often an article has been cited (as measured by PubMed Central, Scopus and CrossRef); how many times it has been ‘socially bookmarked’ (at CiteULike and Connotea); how many times users have Commented, or left Notes, or provided Ratings; and how many blog articles have been written about it (as measured by the blog aggragators Postgenomic, Blog Lines, Nature Blogs and, from today, ResearchBlogging.org).

We’ve created a 2.4 minute screen shot video (with audio commentary) that you can watch to familiarize yourself with the blog aggregation functionality from ResearchBlogging.org so you can see for yourself the benefits of this part of the Article-Level Metrics program.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/8087419]

On launching this new functionality, Pete Binfield, Publisher of PLoS ONE and the Community Journals said:

“We’re delighted to add data from ResearchBlogging.org to the Article Level Metrics program because the blogs that they index are mainly written by practicing scientists, who are well versed at providing readable summaries of the research that we publish”.

Bloggers who regularly write about scientific research are able to register with ResearchBlogging.org and (provided they qualify) they are then entitled to indicate that their blog entries refer to peer reviewed scientific research by adding this icon to their posts.

As a result, the ResearchBlogging.org service represents a high quality source of highly relevant articles, typically written by practicing scientists, on the topic of peer reviewed research.  to receive a is a service from the Seed Media Group that aggregates blog posts about peer-reviewed research, made by . Since all PLoS content is peer reviewed and free to read, PLoS articles tend to be regularly covered by their bloggers. You can find the current list of qualified ResearchBlogging.org bloggers here.

Dave Munger, the co-founder of ResearchBlogging.org and Seed Magazine Columnist, said:

“We’re pleased to be working with PLoS to assess the impact of its articles. PLoS journals do a great job publishing and making research accessible to everyone, and we think coverage in thoughtful blog posts is an important component of the impact of  a peer-reviewed journal article”. You can read more in this blog post.

PLoS ONE and ResearchBlogging.org also collaborate on a monthly “Blog Pick of the Month” competition that we feature on everyONE, the PLoS ONE community blog. Every month, Bora Zivkovic, the Online Discussion Expert for PLoS, chooses the best blog about a PLoS ONE article that has appeared in ResearchBlogging.org and we feature it on our blog. The winning blogger and all the authors of the original PLoS ONE research article all win t-shirts. To enter, you simply need to be a ResearchBlogging.org blogger and start writing about PLoS ONE articles.

For a good example of the researchblogging.org data in action see this article from PLoS Biology: Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy

We welcome feedback and questions on any aspect of this program to alm@plos.org.

The presentation was recorded and so, by the power of multi-multi media, it is now available in many different formats – as a webcast (with both audio and video versions), as a YouTube video, and as a slidecast at MyPlick (incorporating audio, synced with the slides).

In addition, readers may be interested to learn that a FriendFeed room now exists for Article Level Metrics. We do not regard Article Level Metrics as a PLoS-only project and we hope (and expect) that other publishers will adopt the concepts that we are pioneering. Therefore, if was gratifying that this discussion forum was created by members of the community outside of PLoS.  It is being used as a place to collect and discuss issues of relevance to the concept of Article Level Metrics (i.e. it is not specific to PLoS)  and it is definitely worth subscribing to.

The powerpoint and synced audio can be found at Myplick, and the organisers also hope to put the full video of all presentations online sometime soon. My talk concentrated on PLoS ONE (as opposed to PLoS) – I went into some of our motivations and the reasons for our editorial criteria; quite a bit of detail on the PLoS Article-Level Metrics program; showed some sneak peeks of some upcoming features and finished up by demonstrating some of the power of Open Access in a world of interlinked databases. The audio includes approx 20 minutes of questions at the end, which also went into PLoS Currents: Influenza

In my opinion the presentation was… awesome!