On July 31, 2021, CREOS was awarded a grant from IMLS to conduct research and develop open, reliable, standardized indicators that go beyond measures of “overall impact” to advance the understanding of who is, and who is not, participating in open scholarship. The indicators will support the evaluation of large-scale interventions, benchmark comparisons, and monitor the health of the scholarly information ecosystem over time. Micah Altman will lead this three-year project that begins in September 2021.
There is evidence that scholarly processes have bias and create barriers to inclusion; more openness in scholarly communication is needed. Progress towards a better scholarly ecosystem requires standard, reliable measures of the desired attributes of a better system. This project will produce standardized indicators that describe the volume and types of open science output systematically over time.
IMLS awarded $321,557 to create measures based on open bibliometric data, web and social-media mining, and community input.