Workshop Report Out: National Infrastructure for Public Access Usage and Impact Reporting

Christina Drummond, Charles Watkinson, and Niels Stern talk provide an overview and reflections on conversations that took place at an April 2nd workshop on Exploring National Infrastructure for Public Access Usage and Impact Reporting.

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Compiling usage and impact metrics across public and private repositories, services, and publishers is a time and data science expertise-intensive activity undertaken by individual researchers, universities, libraries, and publishers. Challenges related to reader privacy, data ownership, and trusted use confront the exchange and reuse of this data. To advance Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) research impact reporting, on April 2nd, 2023, a National Science Foundation-supported workshop brought together stakeholders to explore how best to leverage shared cyberinfrastructure to support cross-platform systems integrations and ethical data processing that addresses concerns related to artificial intelligence, machine-based aggregation and the use of scholar-specific impact data. Stakeholders advanced four strategic collaboration opportunity areas that surfaced in a November 2022 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) survey of research data organizations, specifically addressing how to facilitate economies of scale for the reporting and analysis of usage data related to publicly accessible scholarship outputs. This panel will feature perspectives on these issues from library, repository, and data platform workshop participants while providing the first summary of the workshop findings. Topics to be addressed will include: a) challenges to cross-platform public and open impact analytics at scale, b) open infrastructure opportunities to improve the FAIRness of usage data, and c) identified gaps in the national infrastructure for scholarly output impact reporting.