Open Access has led directly to an increase in usage of platforms that make is easy for researchers to comply with this mandate by depositing open access versions of their papers. Examples of companies in this space are Academia.edu, ResearchGate.net and Mendeley.  Open Access also means that anyone can contribute to the post-publication evaluation of research articles.

There are a number of initiatives focused on improving the process of peer review. Post-publication peer review, in which journals publish papers after minimal vetting and then encourage commentary from the scientific community, has been explored by several publishers, but has run into difficulties incentivizing sufficient numbers of experts to participate.  Initiatives like Faculty of 1000 have tried to overcome this by corralling experts as part of post-publication review boards.  And sometimes, as in the case of arsenic-based life, the blogosphere has taken peer review into its own hands.

Traditionally the number of first and senior author publications, and the journal(s) in which those publications appear, has been the key criteria for assessing the quality of a researcher’s work. This is used by funding agencies to determine whether to award research grants to conduct their future work, as well as by academic research institutions to inform hiring and career progression decisions. However, this is actually a very poor measure of a researcher’s true impact since a) it only captures a fraction of a researcher’s contribution and b) since more than 70% of published research cannot be reproduced, the publication based system rewards researchers for the wrong thing (the publication of novel research, rather than the production of robust research).

Traditionally, research was conducted by a single scientist or a small team of scientists within a single laboratory. The scientist(s) would conduct the majority of required experiments themselves, even if they did not initially have the necessary expertise or equipment. If they could not conduct an experiment themselves, they would attempt to find a collaborator in another lab to help them by using a barter system. This barter system essentially involves one scientist asking for a favor from another scientist, with the potential upside being co-authorship on any publications that are produced by the work. This type of collaborative arrangement depends heavily on personal networks developed by scientists.

The amount of collaboration required in research will continue to increase, driven by many factors including: The need for ever more complex and large scale instrumentation to delve deeper into biological and physical processes The maturation of scientific disciplines requiring more and more knowledge in order to make significant advances, a demand which can often only be met by pooling knowledge with others An increasing desire to obtain cross-fertilization across disciplines

So with large teams of scientists, often based at remote institutions, increasingly needing to work together to solve complex problems, there will be a demand for new tools to help facilitate collaboration. Specifically, there will be an increasing need for tools that allow researchers to easily find and access other scientists with the expertise required to advance their research projects. In my view, to operate most efficiently these tools also need new methods to reward researchers for participating in these collaborations.

"Campuswide there's a little sensitivity toward measuring faculty output," she says. Altmetrics can reveal that nobody's talking about a piece of work, at least in ways that are trackable—and a lack of interest is hardly something researchers want to advertise in their tenure-and-promotion dossiers. "What are the political implications of having a bunch of stuff online that nobody has tweeted about or Facebooked or put on Mendeley?"

"The folks I've talked to are like, 'Yes, it does have some value, but in terms of the reality of my tenure-and-promotion process, I have to focus on other things,'" she says.

As that phrasing indicates, altmetrics data can't reveal everything. Mr. Roberts points out that if someone tweets about a paper, "they could be making fun of it." If a researcher takes the time to download a paper into an online reference manager like Mendeley or Zotero, however, he considers that a more reliable sign that the work has found some kind of audience. "My interpretation is that because they downloaded it, they found it useful," he says.