On Saturday, June 25, Todd Carpenter and Nettie Lagace introduced NISO's ongoing Altmetrics Initiative to ALA attendees. Carpenter explained some of the reasons why standards are important: in a dramatic example, he noted that the 1999 crash of the Mars Climate Orbiter was caused by, NASA's report admits, "failed translation of English units into metric units in...software." Coming back to scholarship, Carpenter observed that even impact-factor calculation is not certain to everyone, but that measurement are used for crucial business and tenure decisions, so "more certainty is crucial."
Given these issues, NISO launched a program on new forms of assessment three years ago. After lengthy efforts by three working groups, the organization recently published draft versions of use cases and definitions, a code of conduct, nontraditional output types, and persistent identifiers, each of which was described by Carpenter and Lagace during the program. Final versions of these documents will be published later this month.