New Measures of Scholarly Impact (and How it Relates to Pricing)
The way researchers read journal articles has changed, especially in the sciences. MESUR (Metrics for Scholarly Usage of Resources), a project founded in 2006 on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that is trying to shift how scholarly impact is measured away from citations — which he describes as inherently “backwards-looking … kind of like astronomers looking at a galaxy whose light reaches us 50 million years after the events that cause that light to happen” — and toward the sort of real-time usage metrics that Web-based consumption enables. These days, the availability of “usage data” — information on how many times a digital article has been downloaded, and in what context — means that people like Bollen can track the spread of an idea in a scholarly community using the same principles that epidemiologists use to track the spread of a virus in a village. Now that so much journal consumption is digital, the MESUR team is confident that its analysis paints a pretty good picture of influence in the scholarly community writ large, not just a tiny subset. The trend toward data-driven assessment of scholarly communications has implications for how much university libraries are asked to pay, and are willing to pay, for different journals.
http://bit.ly/eQV6gx
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http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/17/scholars_develop_new_metrics_for_journals_impact
