The Bibliometrics and Research Impact Conference 2024 (BRIC), endearingly known as BRIC, was organized and hosted at SFU Vancouver this past June. As a member of the BRIC 2024 Organizing Committee, which also included Alison Moore (SFU), Laura Brendahl (University of Waterloo), Jeffrey Demaine, and George Duimovich (Carleton University), I had the pleasure of interviewing the keynote speakers Juan Pablo Alperin and Stefanie Haustein. They kindly shared insights from their keynotes and offered a peek into their thoughts on the role of social media in academia, altmetrics, and the work being done at the Scholarly Communications Lab. They also extended an invitation to our readers to follow their ongoing research at the lab. For their bios, please see below.

Dr. Juan Pablo Alperin is a co-director of the ScholCommLab, as well as an associate professor at the Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing and an associate director of research of the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is a multi-disciplinary scholar, with training in computer science (BMath, University of Waterloo), social science (MA Geography, University of Waterloo), and education (PhD, Stanford University), who believes that research, especially when it is made freely available (as so much of today’s work is), has the potential to make meaningful and direct contributions to society, and that it is our responsibility as the creators of this research to ensure we understand the mechanisms, networks, and mediums through which our work is discussed and used.

Dr. Stefanie Haustein is a co-director of the ScholCommLab as well as an associate professor at the School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on scholarly communication and research evaluation, bibliometrics, altmetrics, open access, and open science. Stefanie is an affiliated researcher at the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche sur la science et la technologie (CIRST) at Université du Québec à Montréal, the Institute for Science, Society and Policy (ISSP) at University of Ottawa and the Centre for Journalology at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute.

Interview with Juan Pablo Alperin and Stefanie Haustein, BRIC 2024 keynote speakers

Juan and Stefanie, your keynotes at BRIC 2024 focused on two contrasting perspectives on research assessment infrastructure: Stefanie, you discussed the 60 years of closed research assessment infrastructure' while Juan, you explored the 60 years of open research assessment infrastructure?. Could you both share what inspired you to choose these particular topics for your keynotes? Additionally, could you elaborate on how do these models impact the accessibility, transparency, and overall quality of research outputs?

Juan: Rather than contrasting, I would say our keynotes were complementary, Stefanie looked back at how things developed, while I focused on our vision for how things could be. We knew we wanted to share the exciting opportunities for open and inclusive bibliographic sources, but felt that it was important to put things into a historical perspective. Decisions made 50 years ago have had long-term implications for the whole scientific community. We wanted to share that lesson first (in Stefanie’s keynote) so that I could point out that we need to be conscientious of the decisions we make as we adopt open data sources today (in mine). 

Stef: We were inspired to focus on the bigger picture because of the current developments that we see in research assessment and particularly bibliometric infrastructure opening up and becoming more accessible in terms of who gets to use them as well as inclusive of what they cover. Since the 1960s, citation databases had to be selective simply because of the efforts it took to collect and manage the data in a print world. We now see metadata and citations of research outputs becoming open allowing much broader indexing allowing both science of science studies and research assessment to be more inclusive with regards to the type of outputs (e.g., datasets, preprints) and transparent in terms of methodology. 

As co-directors of the Scholarly Communications Lab, how do you leverage your individual expertise to drive the lab’s research agenda? Can you share a specific project where your collaboration has led to significant insights or advancements in the field of scholarly communication?

Juan: The lab has become such an amazing mix of folks, it is by far my favourite professional community. Stefanie and I have come to Scholarly Communications from very different academic lineages, and we’ve welcomed into the lab folks from dozens of different disciplines and backgrounds, as well as folks with a mix of abilities, career stages, and lived experiences. The result is that we have developed a supportive community that helps each other, even when not formally collaborating. 

As far as driving our research agenda, everyone on the team pulls in their own direction, and we then balance each other out. There is no overarching research agenda that we decide upon and impose on others. Rather, we each work on what we’re most interested in, invite each other into collaboration, and the rest has shaped up rather naturally. I think it all works precisely because we have complementary skills and have shared values. 

Our recent work on estimating the amount spent on APCs is a great example of the ways in which we balance each other out. The whole project would not have been possible without Stefanie’s deep attention to detail, but it also benefited from my inserting a dose of pragmatism to finish. Similarly, my propensity for editorializing and inserting my opinions was balanced by Stefanie’s careful consideration of not extending past what the data could show. 

With your extensive involvement in altmetrics and open science, what do you consider the most significant advancements in these areas over the past decade? How have these advancements influenced the ways in which scholarly impact is measured and perceived within the academic community?

Juan: This is a tough one, and my answer will depend on whether you catch me on a more optimistic or a more cynical day. To start with the optimistic view, I think that the more significant achievement is to have greatly expanded the conversation on research assessment. I have largely turned my back on the altmetrics movement, but I do think it was a stepping stone in opening the conversation about expanding what should be considered (even if I don’t think any of the altmetrics developed ever delivered on their promise). I can feel the more cynical side coming out, so I’ll end my answer there. 

Stef: I am usually an optimistic person but in my opinion, altmetrics have not proven useful or promising for a while now, mostly because they largely focused on conflating diverse types of activities into scores and rankings and trying to replace, instead of adding to, literature citations. I am much more optimistic about open science and think that data and indicators can be helpful to incentivize open science practices. 

Given your combined focus on altmetrics and the role of social media in academia, what have you found to be the most significant ways in which social media is transforming scholarly communication? Are there any particular social media platforms or practices that you believe hold the most potential for future research dissemination and engagement?

Juan: Social media played a huge role in my own academic upbringing, and offered me countless opportunities, as it did for many scholars who were active between the mid-2000s and the late 2010s. The last five years, however, my own sense is that it has played a declining role, especially as we’ve seen the “enshittification” of so many online spaces, especially social media platforms. At the moment, I am increasingly excited about the potential for the Fediverse, which people can (somewhat easily) access through Mastodon. Folks can find me on Mastodon for now at https://mastodon.social/@juancommander

Stefanie: I definitely miss the old Twitter and the way it allowed you to share and discuss research outside your personal network. I have met co-authors on Twitter and learned so much about what’s going on in academia via social media but I also feel like it’s a thing of the past. More and more it’s the old fashioned meetings during coffee breaks at conferences that provide these conversations. Other than Juan I didn’t really engage in Mastodon and have limited my time on social media because at the end of the day you only have so much time to try out new platforms. I find that now some of the distribution and staying up to date happens on LinkedIn but other than that I have a lot of the informal conversations on the ScholCommLab’s Mattermost, which we use as our main communication channel in the lab and with many of our collaborators.

Is there anything else you’d like to add and share with the SFU (and beyond) community?

Juan: Just an invitation to follow along to the work we are doing at the lab by signing up for our newsletter, or for those at SFU, to reach out to have a coffee and a conversation. There is a lot of thinking happening at SFU (and perhaps at your institution!) about how to better recognize scholarly activities, and it’s a great time to get involved in those conversations and influence what the future of academic careers will look like. 

I would like to thank Juan and Stefi for their responses to our questions! If you are interested in the ScholCommLab work, you can visit their homepage. You can also reach out directly to Juan, at jalperin@sfu.ca or Stef, at stefanie.haustein@uottawa.ca.