The Make Data Count team is rapidly approaching the first release of standardized and comparable data level metrics (DLMs) on California Digital Library’s Dash and DataONE repositories. Resources on this release will be available shortly, but in the meantime the team would like to share updates on work completed in winter and our spring roadmap.

Kicking off Love Data Week 2018, the Make Data Count (MDC) team is pleased to announce that the first iteration of our Code of Practice for Research Data Usage Metrics Release 1 has now been posted as a preprint. Beginning in June, members from the MDC team and COUNTER began conversations around what a standard for data usage metrics may look like. By September we were able to release an initial draft outline for community feedback.

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.

Journal articles are the currency of scholarly research. As a result, we as a community, use sophisticated methods to gauge the impact of research and measure the attention it receives by analyzing article citations, article page views and downloads, and social media metrics. While imprecise, these metrics offer us a way to identify relationships and better understand relative impact.

Making Data Count (MDC) team members are at the center of many initiatives that focus on aspects of metrics, including DLM. We leverage existing channels to build a new data usage standard and to promote integration and adoption amongst data centers and data consumers. If you want to get in contact and start collaborating with us, please: Join our mailing list Follow us on Twitter Contact us directly!