BitVIEWS
BitViews is an exciting project aimed at improving Open Access to scientific and scholarly publications.
I have a long-standing interest in Open Access: I was one of the signatories of the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative and between 2000 and 2005 I worked ceaselessly on the ELSSS project. BitViews takes an altogether different route to achieve OA. Its starting point is the acknowledgement that the main reason why OA is not default mode for the dissemination of research is the lack of targeted incentives - under the current system academic authors have virtually no incentive to disseminate their research other than via their published articles (which gather citations and hence recognition and esteem). There exists a worldwide network of Institutional Repositories ready and willing to store the post-prints of the articles (the final, post peer-review author's version - not the published article) which can then be accessed free of charge by anyone interested (unlike the published articles, that often are behind a paywall). So why do academic authors not deposit their post-prints on IRs? Because there is no agreed system to record and validate data on viewing/downloading of post-scripts and therefore there is no robust metric for measuring non-citation impact of research. BitViews can fill this gap.
To see how, read the article that my co-author (Camillo Lamanna) and I have published, explaining the basic concept. A follow-up paper (“For views to count, we must count the views.” How a reliable usage metric can provide the missing incentives for Open Access scholarly communication: the BitViews project.) was presented to the Research Libraries UK conference in London on the 22nd of March 2019. The video is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW5_zUUi1Mk. More papers on Bitviews have now been published [Click on the [Research] tab and then on [Published].
I have a long-standing interest in Open Access: I was one of the signatories of the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative and between 2000 and 2005 I worked ceaselessly on the ELSSS project. BitViews takes an altogether different route to achieve OA. Its starting point is the acknowledgement that the main reason why OA is not default mode for the dissemination of research is the lack of targeted incentives - under the current system academic authors have virtually no incentive to disseminate their research other than via their published articles (which gather citations and hence recognition and esteem). There exists a worldwide network of Institutional Repositories ready and willing to store the post-prints of the articles (the final, post peer-review author's version - not the published article) which can then be accessed free of charge by anyone interested (unlike the published articles, that often are behind a paywall). So why do academic authors not deposit their post-prints on IRs? Because there is no agreed system to record and validate data on viewing/downloading of post-scripts and therefore there is no robust metric for measuring non-citation impact of research. BitViews can fill this gap.
To see how, read the article that my co-author (Camillo Lamanna) and I have published, explaining the basic concept. A follow-up paper (“For views to count, we must count the views.” How a reliable usage metric can provide the missing incentives for Open Access scholarly communication: the BitViews project.) was presented to the Research Libraries UK conference in London on the 22nd of March 2019. The video is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW5_zUUi1Mk. More papers on Bitviews have now been published [Click on the [Research] tab and then on [Published].