Thursday, May 9, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre (1400-1430)
Unpacking the Impact and Usage of Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Case Study 
Kathryn Ruddock, University of Calgary; Christie Hurrell, University of Calgary
Description: A graduate thesis or dissertation, for most graduate students, represents the culmination of years of research and study, and are an important record of the intellectual output of an academic institution. Like many academic institutions, the University of Calgary began in 2012 to deposit electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) into PRISM, the University of Calgary’s Digital Repository. PRISM provides a valuable archive and dissemination vehicle for unique research outputs of early career researchers. All theses are described and categorized with disciplinary information. Usage data is tracked from November 2015 – present.
These characteristics of the ETD collection also allow for investigation into understanding the usage of these documents and how they relate to other research outputs, like articles and monographs, the impact of which are commonly measured by metrics such as citation counts or download statistics.
For this case study, we investigated the usage patterns of the ETD collection to understand how these scholarly outputs fit into the scholarly communications ecosystem. Through analysis of statistics and metrics available through the repository as well as those available through academic databases, we explore the following questions: What do repository usage statistics tell us about ETDs as a scholarly output? Do factors like subject and length of time available influence higher usage of ETDs in a repository? And does repository usage correlate to a citation advantage, either for the thesis itself or for derivative works?
Open, Free, and Easy Altmetrics Through Community-Owned and Operated Infrastructure
Juan Pablo Alperin, Public Knowledge Project and ScholCommLab
Description: Despite growing discussions about the need for community-owned and operated scholarly publishing infrastructure, there continues to be a lack of community alternatives for key publishing services. Chief among these are those that can be used for tracking the audiences of scholarly research, either through citation metrics or through social media metrics (altmetrics). While the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) has been working to open access to the necessary data for calculating citation metrics, the recently launched Crossref Event Data (CED) service already offers a stream of mentions of research from across the web. However, the data from CED needs further processing to calculate, aggregate, and represent the altmetrics information before it can be used by researchers or publishers. To make this data useful, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) partnered with ImpactStory to create an open, free, and easy altmetrics service based entirely on open source software, open data, and operated by two non-profit, mission-driven organizations. This new service—Paperbuzz—is already widely available to any journal using Open Journal Systems through a plugin, is natively available to the journals on the Open Library of Humanities platform, and can be added to any webpage through a javascript library (PaperbuzzViz). With Paperbuzz, PKP is building on its 20-year experience as an academic project offering open tools and services, but questions remain about who should be leading such efforts and how they should be funded and sustained. This presentation will touch on the ways in which publishers and librarians can use Paperbuzz and OJS, the advantages and disadvantages of this and other existing altmetrics solutions while simultaneously opening up the discussion on the larger questions surrounding community-based infrastructure.
Building a Trusted Framework for Coordinating OA Monograph Usage Data
Kevin Hawkins, University of North Texas
Description: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently funded a study of the landscape of usage data for open-access scholarly monographs and an investigation of the viability of creating a data trust for sharing of usage data among stakeholders in the publishing ecosystem. In spring 2019, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will publish a final white paper that takes into account feedback from the community during a consultation period. This presentation will provide a summary of the main findings and proposals of the forthcoming white paper.