Cameron Neylon

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I know Iâ€™ve been a bit quiet for a few weeks. Mainly Iâ€™ve been away
for work and having a brief holiday so it is good to be plunging back
into things with some good news. I am very happy to report that the
[Open Society Institute](http://www.soros.org/) has agreed to fund [the
proposal](https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1l32FjbfBkykwMbN75FfVqxSxghINfR9JuQGLrUCauFA&hl=en_GB&authkey=CM-Ok9kC)
that was built up in response to my [initial
suggestion](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/a-collaborative-proposal-on-research-metrics/)
a month or so ago.

OSI, which many will know as one of the major players in bringing the
Open Access movement to its current position, will fund a workshop that
will identify both potential areas where the measurement and aggregation
of research outputs can be improved as well as barriers to achieving
these improvements. This will be immediately followed by a concentrated
development workshop (or hackfest) that will aim to deliver prototype
examples that show what is possible. The funding also includes further
development effort to take one or two of these prototypes and develop
them to proof of principle stage, ideally with the aim of deploying
these into real working environments where they might be useful.

The workshop structure will be developed by the participants over the 6
weeks leading up to the date itself. I aim to set that date in the next
week or so, but the likelihood is early to mid-March. The workshop will
be in southern England, with the venue to be again worked out over the
next week or so.

There is a lot to pull together here and I will be aiming to contact
everyone who has expressed an interest over the next few weeks to start
talking about the details. In the meantime Iâ€™d like to thank everyone
who has contributed to the effort thus far. In particular Iâ€™d like to
thank Melissa Hagemann and Janet Haven at OSI and Gunner from
[Aspiration](http://www.aspirationtech.org/) who have been a great help
in focusing and optimizing the proposal. Too many people contributed to
the proposal itself to name them all (and you can check out the
GoogleDoc history if you want to pull apart their precise contributions)
but I do want to thank [Heather Piwowar](researchremix.wordpress.com)
and [David
Shotton](http://www.zoo.ox.ac.uk/staff/academics/shotton_dm.htm) in
particular for their contributions.

Finally, the success of the proposal, and in particular the community
response around it has made me much more confident that some of the
dreams we have for using the web to support research are becoming a
reality. The details I will leave for another post but what I found
fascinating is how far the network of people spread who could be
contacted, essentially through a single blog post. Iâ€™ve contacted a
few people directly but most have become involved through the network of
contacts that spread from the original post. The network, and the tools,
are effective enough that a community can be built up rapidly around an
idea from a much larger and more diffuse collection of people. The
challenge of this workshop and the wider project is to see how we can
make that aggregated community into a self sustaining conversation that
produces useful outputs over the longer term.

*It's a complete co-incidence that Michael Nielsen posted a piece in the
past few hours that forms a great document for framing the discussion.
I'll be aiming to write something in response soon but in the meantime
follow the top link below.*

###### Related articles {#related-articles .zemanta-related-title}

- [The mismeasurement of
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- [Alt-metrics: A
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- [Archival Metrics \| Promoting a Culture of Assessment in Archives and
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- [ReaderMeter: Crowdsourcing research
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- [Ouroboros and Peer Review: New Proposals Continue to Chase Their Own
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Image via Wikipedia  I know Iâ€™ve been a bit quiet for a few weeks. Mainly Iâ€™ve been away for work and having a brief holiday so it is good to be plunging back into things with some good news. I am very happy to report that the Open Society Institute has agreed to fund the proposal that was built up in response to my initial suggestion a month or so ago.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Beyond the Impact Factor: Building a community for more diverse measurement of research