Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The MIT Libraries Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship will develop open, reliable, standardized indicators that go beyond measures of “overall impact” to advance the understanding of who is, and who is not, participating in open scholarship. There is evidence that scholarly processes have bias and create barriers to inclusion and that more openness in scholarly communication is needed. Progress toward a better scholarly ecosystem requires standard, reliable measures of the desired attributes of a better system. The team will create measures based on open bibliometric data, web and social media mining, and community input. The indicators will describe the volume and types of open scholarship output and support the evaluation of large-scale interventions, benchmark comparisons with individual institutions and disciplines, and monitor the health of the scholarly information ecosystem over time.