Chapter 5: Compliance and Defiance: Michigan Publishing’s Early Encounters with Research Impact Metrics

This chapter describes how Michigan Publishing, the primary scholarly publishing unit at the University of Michigan (U-M), has engaged with scholarly metrics to understand and communicate the impact of our monographs, journals, and other publications. Michigan Publishing is a division of the U-M Library and consists of the U-M Press, Michigan Publishing Services, and our institutional repository, called Deep Blue. As a scholarly publisher at the intersection of tradition and innovation, our main strengths and interests lie in two major areas:

In this chapter, we provide history and context for the experience, assumptions, and expectations that Michigan Publishing brings to the scholarly metrics conversation. As well, we describe some early experiments and what we have learned from them, and look ahead to our future plans as changing internal and external factors compel us to capture and report more and more data about the impact of our publications and services.