1. The impact of metrics on scholarly publishers, research organisations and libraries
Intro self
Considering traditional metrics (views, downloads, citations) and alternative metrics (annotations, twitter mentions etc) here
Thinking about the things that make UP different when it comes to the impact of metrics…
Tom Mowlam, Director of Operations, Ubiquity Press HIRMEOS workshop
Paris, January 2019

2. Ubiquity Press is:
An open access publisher of books and journals, across all disciplines
Author is the customer; different authors want different things
A new publisher
Too long to get impact factors, inclusion in Scopus etc
A platform for university/society presses
Content
In open access, the author is an important ‘customer’ - each might have their own goal for their work, so providing a range of different metrics is good for them to measure their success.
Metrics that have been designed with scientific journals in mind (citation analysis), if they do work for them, might not work well for humanities books which have different publishing traditions, evaluation procedures, author goals.

3. The benefits of publishing open access for different stakeholders… researcher in the middle… this is what we say are the advantages but are we achieving them?
Some of these things we would like to measure as a publisher:
Public engagement (twitter)
New collaborations/connections (annotations)
Re-use in teaching programes (learning platforms like Moodle)
Distribution into different archives, and use within those archives
important to our authors, therefore important to us as a publisher.

4. Ubiquity Press is:
An open access publisher of books and journals and data, across all disciplines
Author is the customer; different authors want different things
A new publisher
Too long to get impact factors, inclusion in Scopus etc
A platform for university/society presses
Est 2012
Takes a long time to get included in traditional metrics evaluation services.
Inclusion in Web of Science/Knowledge and Scopus is partly based on citations of journals by other works in that database - this analysis means (for example) that the impact factor is not assigned until 3-4 years after submission
Stories of publishers recommending to the author that citations to other works from the same publisher be added, established publishers getting their content fast tracked into databases.
Manipulations like publishing ‘ahead of print’ so that citations can start to be gathered in advance of the measuring period.
At the end, just have a number - indicates number of citations but nothing else (eg quality or engagement).
Need something better!

5. Ubiquity Press is:
An open access publisher of books and journals and data, across all disciplines
Author is the customer; different authors want different things
A new publisher
Too long to get impact factors, inclusion in Scopus etc
A platform for university/society presses

6. All the issues before, still apply - being new, being across disciplines, working in the authors' varied interests.
The presses have different goals - in UK Cardiff is 5th on Quality of Research and 2nd on Impact of Research - want to help them measure this.
Some want to grow, others want to stay small and focus on quality.
Presses from Sri Lanka, Latin America, Nepal, Mongolia, India - are facing language and cultural barriers to inclusion in traditional impact measuring, and are less cited, but highly viewed.
We need a range of metrics.
Bangla LAM
Nep Mongolia

7. Dangers with metrics / altmetrics:
Aggregating into a single number
Assuming a high number is good
Culture of chasing metrics
Oversimplification
Altmetric Attention Score = single number is like an impact factor - what is the formula? (Tweet = 1 point, blog post = 5 point, wikipedia = 3 points…)
Present the data underneath, let people analyse and decide themselves.
Discredited research can be cited highly by papers discussing this.
Even a retracted article can be cited by the retraction notice!
Likewise an annotation is an interaction and not necessarily an endorsement of the quality.
Context and interpretation is important
Can encourage bad practice, and metric manipulation
Focus on the quality of the work - don’t chase ‘likes’.

8. In summary Diversity of metrics is good
We would like to understand more what the community wants, and how/which metrics can support that
Context is important when interpreting metrics
A metric should be the start of a conversation
150,000 views
…but only 2 citations
…probably these views are not coming from an academic audience - depending on the criteria of the author, journal, publisher - this might or might not be a success.

9. Thank you! Any questions?
Thanks