Digital Science Announces Support for Altmetric, a Project That Tracks the Online Conversations About Research
LONDON / CHICAGO, IL – 21 June 2012
Digital Science, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd., is pleased to announce support for Altmetric, a project that tracks and measures the attention paid to research online. Altmetric began as a side project of Euan Adie, a product manager for Digital Science, and now moves to become his core focus with additional support from Digital Science. The announcement was made in line with the Altmetrics 2012 workshop in Chicago, part of the ACM Web Science Conference.
Altmetric was founded in early 2011 as a means of collecting article-level metrics and other relevant data for publishers. It delivers this information through a web app, embeddable badges and powerful API.
“Scientists should have an easy way of seeing which papers their peers are talking about and where,” said Euan Adie, “and readers should be able to put the research they find in context. Altmetric can help platforms deliver on both those counts.”
The Altmetric Explorer web app, available to use as an individual or through team accounts, allows users to explore and analyse the attention data collected by the system. A free bookmarklet offering some lightweight functionality of the main app is also available for individual researchers and authors looking for additional context for single articles. Finally, the API permits complete access to the raw data collected by Altmetric which can be integrated into a publisher’s own platforms.
Altmetric is already in use by a number of publishers, including Springer, Nature Publishing Group and BioMed Central.
“Altmetric Explorer is an exciting, powerful and useful tool for BioMed Central. It gives us a targeted view of how much impact each individual paper is having, and where in the world of social media and the web these comments are being made,” said Rebecca Fairbairn of BioMed Central. “Altmetric Explorer makes online media monitoring much easier.”
“Altmetric is currently the only product which provides us with article level metrics on social media activity,” said Martijn Roelandse from Springer. “This allows us to monitor the public discussions of content in social media and to evaluate these, which confirms our interest in discussions that go beyond the publishing process.”
Platform integrations include Utopia Docs and Scopus, through an app for Elsevier’s Sciverse platform.
For more information regarding plans and pricing, visit www.altmetric.com. You can also Altmetric on Twitter @altmetric.