For the past few months, we have worked to garner interest and facilitate discussion about data usage metrics within the community. Internally, we are working to drive development toward comparable, standardized data usage metrics and data citations on repository interfaces. We are excited to share our progress and we want to thank those who have given us feedback or have gotten involved along the way!

The Make Data Count (MDC) project is moving ahead with full force and the team wanted to take a moment to update the research stakeholder community on our project resources and roadmap. In September, the MDC team sat down and mapped out the project plan for our two-year grant.

Following our draft update and executive summary, Make Data Count and COUNTER are proud to release our first draft of a Code of Practice for Research Data . This first iteration is meant to be a draft, and our goal is to receive input and feedback from the community. We ask that you please comment on and mark up the document with questions, suggestions, and/or overall feedback.

As a research and scholarly communications community, we value methods to gauge the impact of research outputs, and we do this in the forms of citations and downloads. But, until now this has been limited to traditional journal publications, and scholarly research is much more than an article. Foremost, data play a major role in the research process and deserve to be valued as a first-class scholarly output.

COUNTER is a non-profit organization supported by a global community of library, publisher and vendor members, who contribute to the development of the Code of Practice through working groups and outreach. COUNTER and MDC  are collaborating to develop and publish a Code of Practice for Research Data. This set of recommendations will focus on how data usage should be measured and reported.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has made a 2-year, $747K award to the California Digital Library, DataCite and DataONE to support collection of usage and citation metrics for data objects. Building on pilot work, this award will result in the launch of a new service that will collate and expose data level metrics.