This Tuesday marked the first ever Altmetric and figshare publisher product day. Invited delegates from across the industry came together in Camden to hear from our guest speakers, and to participate in product workshops to help shape future development.

Up first were Mark Hahnel, founder of figshare, and Euan, from Altmetric, to give an update on what each company had been working on, and what we were hoping to get from the day.

They were followed by David de Roure of the ESRC, who gave an interesting insight into how the reporting of research is evolving beyond the standard PDF and into the open distribution of results, data, and alternative outputs. David’s talk included some fascinating anecdotes and prompted us all to give thought to where our own tools and services were leading.

Natasha Martineau, Head of Research Communications at Imperial College London took to the stage next. Natasha gave a great overview of all of the work that the Communications and Public Affairs Division at Imperial does to raise the profile and impact of its research – from the online news site for news and longer form pieces about research, to working with journalists, and running public engagement events. She also talked about how they evaluate this work; how they work with researchers to report of the results of their efforts, and how communications and public engagement can increase the impact of research. Natasha’s talk raised a lot of interesting talking points about how publishers can work better with institutions to ensure effective coverage, and how Imperial academics had responded to the new initiatives.

We also asked along innovators Sparrho and Writelatex, who each presented a quick overview of their platforms and further demonstrated how disruptive technologies can be effective in supporting and helping to evolve established processes.

Insight into how publishers are making our current tools work for them came from Julie Sutton at Taylor and Francis, who gave a great run through of their figshare implementation (including some very clever looking data!), and there were some suggestions from Euan on how publishers could make best use of the Altmetric data across marketing, editorial, and sales departments, as well as ensuring website users are understanding the context of the article level metrics.

The afternoon was dedicated to product sessions, with attendees given the opportunity to discuss 2 products of their choice in a group format.

Run by the Altmetric and figshare teams, these sessions gave us a chance to ask some key questions of our audience and get valuable feedback, which we now hope to align with when establishing future development priorities.

It was a really interesting day – having never run one before we weren’t quite sure what to expect, and were delighted that everyone who attended was so willing to give us their time and share their opinions. We hope to run more in the future so do drop us a line if this sounds like your kind of thing – we are always looking for feedback on how we can make our tools work better for all of our users.

The Altmetric team is going to be busy over the next few months! It’s back to school time and we’ll be hitting the road again to meet, greet, present and learn from all of you at loads of different events in the run up to Christmas (too early?! get shopping…)

If you’d like to hear more about about how we work and the tools we offer for publishers, institutions and funders, do get in touch to arrange a meeting or stop by our sessions at the following events:

ALPSP Annual Conference
10th – 12th September, London, UK
Altmetric Founder Euan Adie will be speaking in the Metrics and More session along with representatives from Elsevier and Wiley on the morning of Thursday the 11th – drop by the session or email us to arrange a chat.

1:AM Altmetrics Conference
25th – 26th September, London, UK
The Altmetric team will be running, presenting and attending the 1st altmetrics conference, to be held at the Wellcome Collection in London. Over the course of 2 days we will hear from publishers, funders and institutions to see how they are using (or hope to use) altmetrics, and to discuss how the discipline might develop. The event will be live streamed online, so tune in for further details!

Frankfurt Bookfair
8th – 12th October, Frankfurt, Germany
It’s that time of year again already! We’ll be at the Frankfurt Bookfair to meet and greet publishing’s finest – and there’ll be a half hour presentation from Euan on the Professional and Scientific Information hotspot stage in Hall 4.2 at 2pm on Thursday the 9th. Do come along to find out more about how we can help you deliver more value to your authors, readers, and internal teams, and get in touch if you’d like to arrange a time to meet.

Society of Research Administrators Annual Meeting
18th – 22nd October, San Diego, CA
Sara Rouhi, Altmetric Product Sales Manager, will be running a lunch time session Altmetrics: A Practical Introduction on Tuesday the 21st - she’ll also be on hand at booth #604 to answer any questions you might have. Email Sara if you’d like to arrange a meeting.

Internet Librarian International
20th – 22nd October, London, UK
We love librarians! For some time now we’ve offered free tools to librarians, researchers and institutional repository managers to help them get started and find their way around altmetrics.

We’ll be at internet librarian to spread the word; Cat will be running a workshop session on the 20th in conjunction with the nice folks at the University of Sheffield and Wolverhampton University, entitled Altmetrics in the Academy, and Euan will be speaking in the plenary on altmetrics on Wednesday the 22nd. It’s shaping up to be an interesting event – do join us for one of the sessions, or email us for more details.

Digital Library Forum
27th – 29th October, Atlanta, GA
Altmetric product Sales Manager Sara Rouhi will be running a lunch time session, Applied Altmetrics: Implementations and Uses within an Institution on Monday the 27th – join her to find out more about how altmetrics can help you and your faculty in gathering evidence of the wider impact of your research.

Charleston 2014
5th – 8th November, Charleston, SC
Stop by our lunch time discussion, The promise and perils of “alternative metrics”: What librarians need to know about the #altmetrics landscape, to get to grips with the latest developments and new ideas. Altmetric’s Sara Rouhi will be there to answer all and any questions you might have – so feel free to ask!

UKSG One Day Conference and Forum
20th – 21st November, London, UK
We’ll be present on both days so stop by the booth to say hi! Terry Bucknell will be giving a lightning talk overview of all things Digital Science on the afternoon of the 20th.

7th UNICA Scholarly Communication Seminar
27th – 28th November, Rome, Italy
Details TBC!

And likely a few more to follow over the next few months! Do feel free to drop us a line if you have any questions or would like to arrange a chat.

Yesterday Altmetric founder Euan took part in our first ever Ask Me Anything on the science subreddit. With the session title “Misuse of the Journal Impact Factor and focusing only on citations sucks, Ask Me Anything” the stage was set for an interesting and provocative discussion – and that is exactly what we got .

You can view the full session here.

Questions came in thick and fast from researchers and institutions, and they varied from how funders can or should be making use of altmetrics, to how we might encourage their take up amongst the wider research community, to how research is typically reflected in the media.

For an hour long session time went very quickly, and Euan was certainly having to think on his feet as he put together his answers (all of which he was keen to give due attention to before posting).

It was great to see so many different people actively involved in the discussion – you can recap what happened on twitter via the #askeuan hashtag – and as always if you have any questions or comments for us feel free to ask @altmetric, or email info@altmetric.com.

There are still a few questions on Reddit waiting for an answer, and Euan is hoping to get to them in the next few days. Thanks to all who contributed!

Join us for the first ever Altmetric Ask Me Anything at 6pm BST/1pm EST on the 21st of August. Founder Euan Adie will be live on reddit to answer all and anything in the session:

Misuse of the Journal Impact Factor and focusing only on citations sucks.

“It’s Impact Factor season in the academic publishing world, with journals getting their latest scores… but while it’s an interesting indicator, journal level stats and looking only at citations only give you part of the picture when it comes to dissemination and impact.

What about patient advocate groups, or engineers, or ER doctors? What about policy makers and standards bodies? They don’t cite work but they may read or use it. Many papers have “impact” in a very real sense that isn’t reflected in the number of citations they then receive.

The field of altmetrics is about looking at a wider variety of indicators – social media, mainstream media, patents, policy documents, download stats – that relate to a wider variety of outputs – datasets and software as well as papers – to supplement peer review and citations. You may have seen the altmetrics manifesto already at altmetrics.org.

I think altmetrics and the changes that they’re helping to drive present a great opportunity over the next few years for scientists to change how they are assessed for tenure, promotion and for grants: choosing what they should be judged on, making metrics their servant not master and democratising the data behind it all.

But should we care about wider impact? Impact definitely isn’t the same thing as quality, is quality all we should be concerned about?

Have you ever been in the situation where you felt it would have been helpful to be able to demonstrate success beyond citations or the IF of the journal you published in?”

If you wish to participate in the Ask me Anything forum, you will need to register with Reddit. Keep an eye on the Altmetric twitter feed for real-time updates as the session takes place – and get your questions ready!

We are excited to announce that registration is now open for the 1:AM Altmetrics conference, to be held in London on the 25th and 26th of September this year.

This conference is the first of its kind to be held in Europe, and we invite librarians, funders, publishers, researchers, and anyone interested in new forms of research evaluation and impact assessment to join us for what is sure to be an interesting few days.

The aim is to provide an opportunity to share ideas and discuss how and why altmetrics are or should be applied in the scholarly arena. We will hear from publishers, funders and institutions to learn about their experiences (good and bad), and encourage delegate feedback and input in the group workshop sessions.

Amongst the many varied contributors will be an update from James Wilsdon, Chair of the HEFCE steering group on Metrics, and a presentation from Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organisation in the US, who are currently undertaking a review of altmetrics with the aim of developing standards across the discipline.

We are also inviting delegates to share their ideas and experiences in communicating research or the application of altmetrics to their workflow in an informal poster session. Just fill in this form to let us know you’d like to bring one along – we’ll display them in the refreshment area and during the drinks reception. It’s a great opportunity to show off some of the activity that’s been taking place within your organisation, and we can’t wait to learn about of the brilliant initiatives that are underway.

Organised (and kindly supported by) representatives from the Wellcome Trust, Altmetric, PLOS, Elsevier, Springer and eLife, delegate fees are just £15. Following a day of invited speakers and interactive sessions, the Thursday evening provides a chance to get to know colleagues from the wider community during a drinks reception – and there is also the opportunity to take a guided tour of the Wellcome Collection exhibitions.

Travel grants for the conference are on offer to librarians and researchers wishing to attend – to apply please see the details on this page (the deadline for applications is the 29th of August).

Places are likely to fill up fast so register today.

We look forward to having you join us in London!

We recently had party to celebrate the launch of Altmetric for Institutions, and all of the hard work that has gone into it over the last few months.

It was a nice chance to relax, have a beer (and a donut!) and show off our shiny new platform to all of our colleagues.

Altmetric developer Shane was photographer for the night – here is a selection of the action he captured:

We’re already busy working on the next developments (and the next box of donuts…) so stay tuned for more news from us soon.

To celebrate the launch of our new video, Founder Euan Adie takes a look back over the first few years of Altmetric – from the initial idea to building the team we are today: 

What first got you interested in altmetrics?
I used to work in bioinformatics, in a lab at Edinburgh University. I wrote a blog about interesting papers or methods I’d come across, and there was a great set of computational biology blogs by others that I’d read every day.

I found those blogs far more useful than, say, journal club. I always wondered why you couldn’t see links out to blogs from journal articles, or conversely have an index of which papers were being mentioned by who. There’s a lot of good discussion happening around research online and it isn’t usually linked to where it’d be most useful to see it, next to the research in question.

So that was one thing that got me interested in these kinds of ideas. The other was a broader problem about getting credit (and funding) for your work. It’s crazy that we still have to do things like write articles about datasets or software not because people need to read the article but because without it some people will assume it cannot be formally cited, and their uses may not be recognized.

What have been the biggest challenges in the first few years of Altmetric.com?
Just staying afloat! Not in the financial sense, as we were pretty lucky to have paying customers from fairly early on. But there was always a lot to do, and we were a very small team, in some cases with no prior experience in scaling up to meet new challenges.

Getting investment from Digital Science helped with this, as they were able to offer some support beyond just money. In particular Aldo de Pape at Digital Science was really helpful in a hands on kind of way in the early days.

What’s your favourite thing about going to work every day?
Interacting with the team. Which sounds really cheesy, but is true. One advantage of having a start-up is being able to choose who you get to work with.

It makes me very happy to look around and see talented, passionate people doing a much better job than I ever could solving technical problems, leading technology or marketing, in sales and in managing product development.

That and the free snacks box.

What advice would you give to someone else considering starting up their own company?
I’d suggest they do a thought experiment. What would they say to somebody considering a career in scientific research? I reckon the two paths are pretty similar.

It’s a potentially a very satisfying career but it’ll take over your life and while you can contribute something very positive to science it’s unlikely that you’re going to get rich or win a Nobel prize at the end of it.

A lot comes down to what you want to get out of the experience. I like being able to do things as a startup rather than just discuss them with dozens of stakeholders in endless meetings. I like being able to work on the kinds of problems I love without having to answer to others. The downside is that your start-up’s responsibility to its staff and customers falls ultimately on you.

More broadly the advice I’d give is:

• If you do decide to do it, think about a co-founder, you don’t need to go alone
• … then don’t put off jumping in, there is never going to be a ‘good’ time.
• Don’t assume that everybody else in the space knows what they’re doing. It’s possible succeed with hard work and luck, which is not the same thing.

If you could do it all again, would you?
Yes! Though I’d find co-founders. I wish the current team had been there from the start.

Don’t forget to check out Euan’s video interview on the Digital Science blog.