Altmetrics and the Decoupled Journal: An Endgame for Open Access

In celebration of Open Access Week (Oct. 22-28, 2012), the Duke University Libraries welcome Jason Priem to discuss new methods of scholarly communication and how we understand the impact of changing modes of scholarly publishing. Priem is a Ph.D. candidate at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. As the movement toward universal open access (OA) gathers momentum, the most salient OA questions are changing from "if" and even "when," to "what will an OA world look like?" Is open access an incremental improvement, or will it lead to fundamental shifts in the way scholarship is communicated, filtered, and disseminated? In this talk, Priem argues that the latter is the case: new ways of measuring scholarly impact on the social Web--"altmetrics"--will allow real-time, crowdsourced filtering of diverse scholarly products, leading to a new landscape of interoperable services that replace traditional journals. Priem will also demonstrate total-impact, an open-source tool for gathering altmetrics, and show how it can be used to promote OA, open data, and open source to faculty.