About

ImpactStory is an open-source, web-based tool that helps researchers explore and share the diverse impacts of all their research products—from traditional ones like journal articles, to emerging products like blog posts, datasets, and software. By helping researchers tell data-driven stories about their impacts, we're helping to build a new scholarly reward system that values and encourages web-native scholarship. We’re funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and incorporated as a nonprofit corporation.

ImpactStory delivers open metrics, with context, for diverse products:

team

Jason Priem is a cofounder of ImpactStory and a doctoral student in information science at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Since coining the term "altmetrics," he's remained active in the field, organizing the annual altmetrics workshops, giving invited talks, and publishing peer-reviewed altmetrics research.

Jason has contributed to and created several open-source software projects, including Zotero and Feedvis, and has experience and training in art, design, and information visualisation. Sometimes he writes on a blog and tweets.

Heather Piwowar is a cofounder of ImpactStory and a leading researcher in the area of research data availability and data reuse. She wrote one of the first papers to measure the citation benefit of publicly available research data and has studied patterns in public deposition of datasets, patterns of data reuse, and the impact of journal data sharing policies.

Heather has a bachelor’s and master’s degree from MIT in electrical engineering, 10 years of experience as a software engineer in small companies, and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Informatics from the University of Pittsburgh. She is an frequent speaker on research data archiving, writes a well-respected research blog, and is active on twitter (@researchremix).

history

ImpactStory began life as total-impact, a hackathon project at the Beyond Impact workshop in 2011. As the hackathon ended, a few of us migrated into a hotel hallway to continue working, eventually completing a 24-hour coding marathon to finish a prototype. Months of spare-time development followed, then funding. We’ve got the same excitement for ImpactStory today.

In early 2012, ImpactStory was given £17,000 through the Beyond Impact project from the Open Society Foundation. Today ImpactStory is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, first through a $125,000 grant in mid 2012 and then a two-year grant for $500,000 starting in 2013.

philosophy

As a philanthropically-funded not-for-profit, we're in this because we believe open altmetrics are key for building the coming era of Web-native science. We're committed to:

Contact and FAQ

We'd love to hear your feedback, ideas, or just chat! Reach us at team@impactstory.org, on Twitter, or via our help forum. Or if you've got questions, check out our FAQ.