Pushing the boundaries on citation tracking and usage reporting for open research outputs

Reporting usage measures for research outputs, such as views, downloads, and citations, helps repositories showcase the value of their collections and provide recognition to researchers. Usage information is also crucial for institutions seeking to include open outputs in research evaluations. However, tracking citations consistently and at scale for outputs other than journal articles is challenging due to limitations in the publisher workflows, the need for standardized frameworks to aggregate and normalize citations, and metadata gaps that limit the context information associated with a citation. This panel-led discussion will explore how repositories, institutions, and community initiatives are addressing these challenges. We will hear repository efforts to capture and display citation information, insights on institutional needs for citation information in the context of policy implementation and research evaluation, and updates from the Data Citation Corpus project which seeks to scale the data citations that are openly available to the community. The discussion will explore progress and lessons learnt from community efforts to identify, capture and aggregate usage of open outputs through a diversity of methodologies, and share insights toward mechanisms to more broadly integrate usage events taking place beyond the repositories into repository platforms.