Adding altmetric doughnut: proposal to increase author visibility on University repositories in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lankan universities have developed their institutional repositories to promote communications of research findings among stakeholders. At present, universities’ strategic plans inevitably include measures and actions to increase the webometric rankings of the institution. This is partly achieved through accessible local research publications deposited on self-archived platforms. Despite, to what extent the research and publication reach the general public is the question. Most of these repositories use in-built metrics, visible only to administrators and registered users who can view the number of downloads and data as such. However, those analytics do not show the visibility of research among the general public except for the system/database administrators. However, the paradigm shifted a few years ago to adopt a holistic bibliometric to evaluate the research’s impact on society. The majority of laypeople are active on social media and do not have access to almost any scholarly resources available via expensive subscriptions. At this point, the authors propose Altmetric tools to expand the author’s visibility on non-scholarly platforms such as mass and social media. Almost all university libraries in Sri Lanka, run their repositories on DSpace open-source software. Altmetric badges can be embedded into DSpace through the proper configuration. By adding an Altmetric widget, popularly known as Altmetric doughnut, the visibility of publications is expected to increase author’s visibility and his/her work on other platforms, especially on social media. In this regard, the study proposes possibilities to incorporate freely available webometric tools to make the research visible and viable in society. An extensive research project will be planned and executed to assess the technical compatibilities, challenges, and prospects of adding Altmetric tools to the Sri Lankan university repositories.