Making Data Count: PLOS, CDL, and DataONE join forces to build incentives for data sharing

In partnership with the University of California Curation Center at the California Digital Library,and DataONE, we are pleased to announce the launch of a new project to develop data-level metrics. This project is funded by an EAGER grant from the National Science Foundation. The project, titled “Making Data Count: Developing a Data Metrics Pilot”, will result in a suite of metrics that track and measure data use. The proposal is available on eScholarship (http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9kf081vf).

Sharing data is time consuming and researchers need incentives for undertaking the extra work. Metrics for data will provide feedback on data usage, views, and impact that will help encourage researchers to share their data. This project will explore and test the metrics needed to capture activity surrounding research data.

The Data-Level Metrics (DLM) pilot will build from the successful open source Article-Level Metrics community project, Lagotto, originally started by PLOS in 2009. ALM provide a view into the activity surrounding an article after publication, across a broad spectrum of ways in which research is disseminated and used (e.g., viewed, shared, discussed, cited, and recommended, etc.)

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