Introducing Sensus Impact’s Community of Practice

The purpose of this first meeting was to provide an overview of the product, declare the purpose of the group in the lead-up to launch and following, provide a timeline for development and go-to-market activities, and leave room for questions and discussion.

Here, we share a distillation of what was discussed.

Introduction

Sensus Impact is a new community platform for both publishers and funders to quantify the reach and impact of funded research articles. Sensus Impact is an initiative of Silverchair, the only fully independent, high-volume content platform provider specializing in serving scientific and scholarly publishers. The MVP is a collaboration with Oxford University Press and Hum. The solution itself is delivered using the Silverchair Platform and will leverage Silverchair’s proven and thoughtful approach to support and platform development.

This product will only reach success if its development is informed by stakeholders representing a variety of industry viewpoints, which motivated the establishment of this Community of Practice (CoP). This cross-functional group’s purpose is to inform the initial development, go-to-market positioning, and post-launch enhancements of Sensus Impact. Through offering feedback on functionality and positioning, members of our CoP help to shape the future developments of this initiative.

When asked about their motivations for joining the CoP, learning about how other publishers are responding to Open Access mandates was top of mind. Other contributing motivations included: 1) extending the value of their brand by showing the reach and impact of published work, and 2) better supporting authors by demonstrating their reach.

Background

Sensus Impact is slated to be a platform that synthesizes funded articles, their metadata, article reads/downloads, alternative engagement metrics, and citations in a multi-faceted quantification of funded research reach and impact. Sensus Impact was created to provide accountability and answer the question, “What are we getting for the dollars we spend/support that we give?” from the viewpoint of both publishers and funders. With the fragmented reporting landscape, proliferation of online venues, and new directly paying stakeholders, there is a gap that needed to be filled. Sensus Impact’s mission is to support researchers, funders, and publishers by:

1. Reporting value to funders and authors with multi-faceted quantitative evidence of the reach and impact achieved by the publisher for funded articles
2. Protecting research integrity by supporting the definitive Version of Record (VoR) of each article at the publisher venue (where corrections, errata, and retractions are applied)
3. Preserve author choice in where to publish their research outputs
4. Ensuring publishers at all service levels can contribute to support open access publishing of funded research in a sustainable economic and brand-preserving manner

How it Works

Metadata Records and Usage Reporting

Sensus Impact is seeded by member publishers who provide the metadata records and publisher-platform usage analytics of their funded articles, with links back to the publisher platform for delivery of full-text. That information will be shared via automated transfer frameworks being developed by Silverchair.

Funder Impact Dashboards

Powered by Hum, Sensus Impact will automatically concatenate usage, attention, and citation data into interactive dashboards for funders to examine the impact and reach that publishers have delivered from their funding. Users will be able to further drill down into the data to examine specific publications, grants or awards, and authors.

Search

The product will provide a user-friendly search to surface all relevant funded articles and link them to the Version of Record. The search functionality will be able to key off of any aspect of the record, including funders, grants or awards, authors, topics, keywords, publishers, and more.

Compliance & Impact

Evaluating the effectiveness of open access policies and funding

Sensus Impact itself is an essential complement to the mission and function of CHORUS. CHORUS provides a centralized system for publishers to assess researcher compliance with funder open access policies. Now, Sensus Impact will provide a centralized system for publishers and funders to assess the reach and impacts that their funded open access research is making in science and the world.

Engagement & Impact:

Evaluating the reach of open access research and funding

Sensus Impact is an essential complement to the mission and function of existing industry solutions, such as COUNTER, Publisher Platform usage statistics, and Altmetrics to measure user engagement. COUNTER provides a centralized framework for institutions to assess engagement with research, Publisher Platforms display article-level citation and on-platform engagement information, and Altmetrics communicates the citation of and engagement with content outside of traditional reference pathways. By combining elements of these established solutions, Sensus Impact will provide a centralized hub for publishers to access both engagement and impact.

Sustainability

Adoption of this product will be open to all scientific and scholarly publishers who want to use this neutral platform to quantify their impact to funders and authors. The program is anticipated to be sustainable through a combination of annual membership fees required from participating publishers as well as small per-article fees. Membership fees will follow a sliding scale informed by the size of the publisher.

These fees will allow sustainability of the initial service and expansion of the scope and value of the service over time. The CoP will guide and provide feedback on the membership fees and models.

Timeline

As the CoP has now been developed and engaged, the next steps are to finalize a pricing model, reach other core stakeholders, continue development work and demonstrate progress and share documentation as it’s available, and load initial OUP content for the pilot launch. From there, Sensus Impact will begin to onboard other publishers in the second half of 2024. Post-MVP development plans will be informed by and shared with the community to provide a better roadmap of the future of this initiative.

 

For more information about Sensus Impact, you can visit sensusimpact.com or check out this blog post. If you’re interested in joining our next session on September 22, 2023, please reach out to hswain@silverchair.com.