Reproducibility or Producibility? Metrics and their masters

Reproducibility of indicators and metrics is an important topic as it underlies an increasing part of the approach taken to research evaluation. But reproducibility of metrics is not the critical question. The more important question is around access to the data to create metrics, and around who owns the metrics and the transparency of the algorithms and data elements. In short, is it not about producibility rather than reproducibility? With Dimensions, Digital Science has taken a first step in making publication and citation data more openly available. But, perhaps more importantly, Dimensions links other types of data to the familiar bibliometrics landscape to allow the community to go beyond citation-based indicators. The team at Digital Science believes in the “separation of powers” - data should be developed and hosted by providers and the community should own the metrics used to measure itself. Work has started to collaborate with the scientometric and research management community to support their development and implementation of metrics based on the Dimensions data and platform.