In 2013, the National Information Standards Organization launched a three-year project to identify areas of potential community consensus around these new metrics and then develop recommended practices in those areas. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
After collecting community input on potential activities, NISO surveyed the community to prioritize five areas of work around which to develop community consensus.
The NISO Working Groups produced a set of recommended practices that included: definitions and use cases for alternative metrics, applications of metrics for non-traditional scholarly outputs, collections of persistent identifiers around which metrics can be built, and a Code of Conduct for metrics providers.
The development of standards and recommended practices around altmetrics will encourage adoption of these new metrics forms and will add to the trust in those metrics for the academy.
