Altmetrics in Institutional Repositories: New Perspectives for Assessing Research Impact

Abstract

The aim of this project is to find out if and how Institutional Repositories (IR) are using alternative metrics or Altmetrics (besides usage statistics and citation counts) as a value-added service to showcase their content impact and give some hints on how this tool can be used to supplement the traditional research performance assessment exercise in an institution. Altmetrics can provide a measure of impact for all non-journal scholarly works available in Open Access (OA), like usage statistics, but it can go further by contextualizing the readership of an author’s research output. The increasing importance of Altmetrics indicators led to its inclusion in the 2014 edition of the Ranking Web of Repositories. This project promises to be useful for repositories managers in that it gives some examples of good practices of implementation of Altmetrics along with other metrics in IRs which can help to increase the content, foster the adoption of OA by authors, contribute to the visibility of the institution and meet the funding agencies requirements, thus making a strong case for the relevance of IRs in the context of the research assessment process.