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Open Access for Scholarly Publishing

DePauw University's faculty passed an Open Access Policy in 2014 (the first college in Indiana to do so) and this guide is meant to point faculty towards resources to guide them in publishing open access and making their work available to a wider audience

Author Rights and Metrics

What are Altmetrics?

Altmetrics let us measure and monitor the reach and impact of scholarship and research through online interactions. Altmetrics stands for "alternative metrics"  and are intended to provide a more complete picture of how research and scholarship are used. Traditional bibliometrics have long played a role in promotion and tenure, and include benchmarks such as h-index, impact factor, and citation counts. Altmetrics track your research on the social web through media coverage, citations in policy documents, Twitter mentions, and many other outlets. Additionally, altmetrics track more than journal articles, and can also gather data on books, datasets, posters, videos, and more. Altmetrics are meant to complement, not replace, these traditional measures.

Finding Altmetrics

How can you find alternative metrics for a publication? There are a variety of tools you can use to find this information. Additionally, many journals are now incorporating altmetrics into their websites, including journals published by Springer, Wiley, Nature Publishing Group, and select Elsevier publications.

  • Altmetric Bookmarklet: Free bookmarklet that displays cites, saves, links, and social media mentions for individual articles.

  • Impact Story: Join free with Twitter. Impact Story is an open-source website that allows researchers to create an online profile to help track the impact of their work.

  • PlumX: You can access PlumX metrics through many databases, like the Library's institutional repository.

  • Metrics Toolkit: For more discussion on all of the different kinds of metrics and use cases for each, visit the Metrics Toolkit. This toolkit also allows you to see appropriate metrics for different kinds of outputs for different scholarly fields.

From Northwestern University: Altmetric Toolbox

Simplify promotion and tenure or just make it easier for colleagues to access your publications: create a digital research identifier. Digital identifiers allow you to claim your publications under a single, unique ID. This is particularly critical if you have published under more than one name or variant of your name or if you have a name that may be frequently confused with someone else (e.g., Jones).

Register for free, unique identifiers with ResearcherID and ORCID in order to distinguish your research activities from that of others with similar names. Once you have created your unique IDs, use them any time you submit work for publication, apply for grants, or in the research workflow to ensure that your work is properly attributed to you.

This will also allow you to pull bibliographies and reports, such as h-index, more easily.

Scopus Author Identifier

A Scopus Author Id is automatically assigned to every author who has an article indexed in Scopus. This ID is linked to an author profile in the Scopus database which contain additional author information and metrics. 

From USF's ORCID & Other Digital Researcher IDs

OA in Promotion and Tenure:

Most openly accessible published items are assigned a digital object identifier (DOI). This unique permanent URL is easily harvested into your ORCID profile. Read more at our FAQ. What is a DOI and why is it important?

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