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I  haven’t written about altmetrics so far. Not because it’s not a worthwhile subject, but because there’s so much I don’t know where to begin.

Traditional pre-publication peer review of scientific output is a slow, inefficient, and unreliable process. Efforts to replace or supplement traditional evaluation models with open evaluation platforms that leverage advances in information technology are slowly gaining traction, but remain in the early stages of design and implementation. Here I discuss a number of considerations relevant to the development of such platforms. I focus particular attention on three core elements that next-generation evaluation platforms should strive to emphasize, including (1) open and transparent access to accumulated evaluation data, (2) personalized and highly customizable performance metrics, and (3) appropriate short-term incentivization of the userbase. Because all of these elements have already been successfully implemented on a large scale in hundreds of existing social web applications, I argue that development of new scientific evaluation platforms should proceed largely by adapting existing techniques rather than engineering entirely new evaluation mechanisms. Successful implementation of open evaluation platforms has the potential to substantially advance both the pace and the quality of scientific publication and evaluation, and the scientific community has a vested interest in shifting toward such models as soon as possible.

Report on the "What is an author? What should be? Who gets what credit for what work?" question.

We analyze the online response to the preprint publication of a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and May 2011. We study three...

The "arsenic life" story in a nutshell: anarchic social web 1, traditional publishing 0.

Traditionally, scholarly impact and visibility have been measured by counting publications and citations in the scholarly literature. However, increasingly scholars are also visible on the Web,...

Guess when I tweeted my papers? Top ten downloaded papers from my department in the last year, 7 of which include me in the author list.  I...

In growing numbers, scholars are integrating social media tools like blogs, Twitter, and Mendeley into their professional communications. The online, public nature of these tools exposes and...