EAGER: Secure Research Impact Metric Data Exchange: Data Supply Chain and Vocabulary Development

Fostering open science requires usage and impact data for publicly accessible information. This project will advance open science by accomplishing the following: a) documenting the usage and impact data supply chain for article and data research outputs, to complement findings for books, and b) engaging research infrastructure stakeholders to crosswalk usage and impact related vocabularies across scholarship outputs and disciplines. The usage and impact data pertaining to a single publicly accessible research output (book, article, or dataset) are created across a complex array of public and private publishers, publication distributors and aggregators, repositories, discovery services and service platforms. Comparable, high-quality information access is vital to research information management systems, impact reporting, and innovation policy; and is inherent to the provision of scholarship impact statements alongside data management plans. Yet, compiling usage and impact metrics for publicly accessible scholarship across public and private repositories, services, and publishers is a time and data-science intensive activity undertaken by individual researchers, universities, libraries, and publishers. While services provision some usage data, challenges related to secure data brokerage, automated data access, and auditing by a trusted, neutral infrastructure complicate the exchange and aggregation of usage data across commercial and non-commercial competitors. This project aims to inform whether a national cyberinfrastructure is needed to support the exchange and processing of sensitive and proprietary usage and impact metrics generated by US-based research publishers and distributors. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.