Last week Mike participated in the first meeting of the NISO meeting on Altmetrics, and I then presented at the PLOS Article Level Metrics (ALM) workshop that took place on the following two days at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

(picture from flickr  Some rights reserved by BAIA)

Compared with the previous year’s ALM workshop, it was great to see an evolution of thinking about the space in general.  There was also a notable increase in participants at both ends of the spectrum, including both funders of research looking to use altmetrics as a part of their processes as well as researchers pushing forward on examining how altmetrics correlate with traditional measures of impact.

The presentation from Adam Dinsmore at the Wellcome Trust both showcased the opportunity of using article level metrics to evaluate grant funding, as well as some of the challenges in collecting the data.  We anticipate that some of the work we are doing on the PlumX platform will be able to streamline some of the general challenges he outlined.

Another highlight of the conference for me was Geoffrey Bilder’s presentation about some of the myths about DOIs and new services that Crossref is providing in service of ALMs.

Peter Brantley’s blog post about “Measuring Altmetrics:  The Network and Scholarly Publishing” had the following summary from the two days:

It is my impression, after the NISO and PLOS meetings, that altmetrics will become an essential component of evaluating the merit of scholarly contributions, augmenting but not replacing earlier measurements. Altmetrics gains in relevance even as it heralds a loss of the precision produced by earlier academic activity. It gives us a window into the impact of research work in the context of overlapping forms of network-based interaction. In that, it simply mirrors the growing complexity of science and our societies.

Carly Strasser’s blog post on how Universities can improve academic services through wider recognition of altmetrics and alt-products also summarized both the workshops as well as provided suggestions on how universities might begin to incorporate altmetrics into their own services.

For our part, you can view the slides from my talk about Altmetrics in Practice.  In it, I tried to show a bit about how our PlumX platform is built for the big data that now exists surrounding scholarly communication and walked through several of the use cases for how our metrics are being used by our customers.