Author: Daniella Lowenburg

Notes: The Making Data Count project is a Sloan funded effort to develop standardised metrics for data usage across data repositories. It represents the most general effort to track usage for generic research data to date. Here they report progress within two repositories (California Digital Library and DataONE) and are seeking to get engagement from other repositories to expand the program.

Summary: One year into our Sloan funded Make Data Count project, we are proud to release Version 1 of standardized data usage and citation metrics!

As a community that values research data it is important for us to have a standard and fair way to compare metrics for data sharing. We know of and are involved in a variety of initiatives around data citation infrastructure and best practices; including Scholix, Crossref and DataCite Event Data. But, data usage metrics are tricky and before now there had not been a group focused on processes for evaluating and standardizing data usage. Last June, members from the MDC team and COUNTER began talking through what a recommended standard could look like for research data.

Since the development of our COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data we have implemented comparable, standardized data usage and citation metrics at Dash (CDL) and DataONE.