Metrics being applied in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) are too often based on the practices of more scientifically oriented scholarship, or simply on what is possible for our technologies to measure.
The collective challenge and responsibility of evaluators, especially within an HSS context, is to articulate, incentivise and reward practices that enrich scholarly lives and expand the understanding of scholarship itself. Evaluators need to be able to reflect on a broader understanding of scholarly activity, including indicators for diversification of knowledge, knowledge transfer, and underrewarded/underrepresented work in the academy such as microtransactional scholarly activities.
LIBER’s Role
The research library community has been long invested in the use of bibliometrics and altmetrics in scholarly communication. LIBER’s participation allows it to share the expertise of European research libraries internationally, and to promote and foster international collaborations across the Atlantic. LIBER is:
- Contributing expertise in the area of scholarly communication and metrics;
- Participating in each stage of the project that requires expertise in mapping scholarly communication outputs to practices and values;
- Helping develop indicators, including a data model for the extraction of indicators from syllabi.