Open Metrics for Open Repositories

Later today Nick Sheppard will present a paper entitled “Open Metrics for Open Repositories” at the Open Repositories 2012 conference.

This paper, which was written my myself, Nick, Jenny Delasalle, Mark Dewey, Owen Stephens, Gareth Johnson and Stephanie Taylor, describes the importance of metrics for institutional repositories for a number of stakeholders, including funders at a national level, developers of services which may aggregate repository content, librarians and research support unit within institutions as well as the individual researchers and their departmental colleagues.

In light of the diverse requirements for metrics across these stakeholder communities, in the paper we argue that such metrics should be provided as open data. This would appear to be particularly relevant in the context of open repositories – we are aware of the tensions regarding open access to research publications due to the complexities of quality assurance processes and business models for funding peer-reviewing, but such considerations should not act as a barrier for providing access to the variety of usage statistics and related data associated with repositories.

Our paper is available from the University of Bath institutional repository. In addition, as Nick has described in a post on the Repository News blog at Leeds Metropolitan University, Nick will be presenting the paper later today. The presentation will be given in the RF1: Pecha Kucha – Repository Tools and Approaches which starts at 15.30 today Tuesday 10 July. Note that the Twitter hashtag for the conference is #or2012 – so follow this tag in your Twitter client at around this time to follow the discussion about the paper.  The slides Nick will use in the presentation are available on the Slideshare repository and embedded below.

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