Learn about us
Open data metrics enable evaluation of data usage
Make Data Count is an initiative that promotes the development of open data metrics to enable evaluation of data usage.
Open Data Metrics Require Open Infrastructure
Our vision: Research data are valued research outputs across scholarly activities, evaluation, and communications.
While there has been an increasing interest in research data and the importance of data sharing in recent years, we lack standardized, adopted ways to evaluate the impact of open data across the research ecosystem. We need the means to complete meaningful evaluations that can lead to credit for researchers, incentives for data sharing, and an understanding of how open data advances discovery.
Data Metrics
To enable the evaluation of data usage, Make Data Count drives the development of community-led transparent and meaningful open data metrics.
Data metrics are contextualized quantitative or qualitative measures of how open datasets are accessed or utilized. This includes normalized counts of views and downloads, data citations (i.e. structured references to data as part of a scholarly work), and other measures of data usage.
Make Data Count works on three main areas:
Open infrastructure
Open infrastructure to enable the evaluation of data usage
Outreach
Outreach to drive awareness and adoption of data metrics
Evidence
Evidence on the usage and impact of open data through collaboration with bibliometricians
“Make Data Count advances several strategic priorities that are central to successfully curating research data, including building open, transparent metrics for data use. Understanding how (and how much) research data are used is critically important in developing scholarly and technical systems to support reuse and reproducibility.“
Jamie Wittenberg, University of Colorado Boulder
Make Data Count Advisory Group
Our initiative is guided by the Make Data Count Advisory Group, which includes representatives of institutions, funders, publishers, data repositories and DataCite. The Advisory Group provides strategic input towards the scope and activities of Make Data Count, including ongoing projects and outreach.
Matt Buys
DataCite
John Chodacki
California Digital Library
Britta Dreyer
DataCite
Scott Edmunds
GigaScience
Maria Gould
DataCite
Kristi Holmes
Northwestern University
Jennifer Lin
Independent
Jose Benito Gonzalez Lopez
CERN
Daniella Lowenberg
University of California Office of the President
Chris Mentzel
Stanford University
Damian Pattinson
eLife
Carly Strasser
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Jamie Wittenberg
University of Colorado Boulder
Get involved
Make Data Count is a community initiative. We seek to collaborate with individuals, groups and organizations with an interest in responsible approaches to assessing the impact of open data.
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