In 2013 Isabella Peters became Professor of Web Science at ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and the Chair of the Web Science research group at Kiel University, Germany. She received her PhD in Information Science at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Her research focuses on user-generated content and its potential in knowledge representation and information retrieval, as well as on scholarly communication on the social web, e.g. altmetrics.

Professor Peters is active in the Association for Information Science and Technology (in particular European Chapter and SIGMetrics) as well as in the Leibniz Research Alliance Science 2.0. She is part of the European expert group on altmetrics that advises the Open Science Policy Platform.

The various forms of metrics (e.g., bibliometrics, altmetrics) are often used for research assessment only. However, researchers and other stakeholders of the scientific enterprise usually forget that metrics can serve different purposes that go beyond assessment, e.g., discovery of scholarly publications.

The working group critically discusses this one-dimensionality and demonstrates how metrics can be used responsibly and for a wide spectrum of use cases. Moreover, it raises attention to the major problems of metrics which can best be described with following quote: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.

I am happy that with the help of LIBER and the working group I am able to reach a broad audience capable of making a real difference in this regard.