The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Indiana University Bloomington and NISO a $349,000 grant for "Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-Scale Usage Data."
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing associate professor Johan Bollen and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) will share the Mellon Foundation grant designed to build upon the Metrics from Scholarly Usage of Resources (MESUR) project that Bollen began in 2006 with earlier support from the foundation. Bollen is also a member of the IU School of Informatics and Computing's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS) and the IU Cognitive Science Program faculty. "We are very pleased to receive this generous support from the Mellon Foundation for planning the future of the MESUR project," said Bollen, the project's principal investigator. "The initial work on MESUR received a great deal of positive attention. We believe that there is tremendous potential in this area of research for improving the availability, rapidity and quality of scholarly assessment and this grant will help enhance the impact of MESUR and place it on a path toward viability as a public resource."
The new funding for "Developing a Generalized and Sustainable Framework for a Public, Open, Scholarly Assessment Service Based on Aggregated Large-scale Usage Data," will support the evolution of the MESUR project to a community-supported, sustainable scholarly assessment framework. MESUR has already created a database of more than 1 billion usage events with related bibliographic, citation and usage data for scholarly content.
The project will focus on four areas in developing the sustainability model—financial sustainability, legal frameworks for protecting data privacy, technical infrastructure and data exchange, and scholarly impact—and then integrate the four areas to provide the MESUR project with a framework upon which to build a sustainable structure for deriving valid metrics for assessing scholarly impact based on usage data. Simultaneously, MESUR's ongoing operations will be continued with the grant funding and expanded to ingest additional data and update its present set of scholarly impact indicators.
"This is a tremendous opportunity to serve the community and we are pleased to be partnering with Dr. Bollen on this project," said Todd Carpenter, managing director of NISO and co-principal investigator. "The project will require the coordinated and engaged participation of the full spectrum of stakeholders in scholarly communications and NISO is uniquely positioned to act as a neutral third party in bringing together these parties to obtain consensus and a successful outcome."
