NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Initiative

Before 2013, “altmetrics” was a term coined in the 2010 altmetrics manifesto but had no shared vocabulary, no agreed use cases, and no data-quality expectations for the vendors aggregating it. NISO’s Alternative Assessment Metrics (Altmetrics) Initiative was the first attempt by a standards body to close that gap. The National Information Standards Organization received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2013 to run the project in two phases: a 2013–2014 landscape review (Phase 1) identifying the specific gaps blocking broader adoption of altmetrics, followed by a 2014–2016 Phase 2 in which three working groups produced the initiative’s actual deliverables.

• Working Group A — Definitions and Use Cases reviewed the existing altmetrics literature and stakeholder requirements to establish shared terminology.
• Working Group B — Output Types and Persistent Identifiers addressed how non-traditional research outputs (datasets, software, code, visualizations) should be identified and tracked, including persistent-identifier requirements.
• Working Group C — Data Quality produced the Altmetrics Data Quality Code of Conduct: recommendations for data providers and aggregators on transparency, replicability, and accuracy, plus a standard self-reporting disclosure table vendors can use to publicly state their own adherence.

All three groups’ work was consolidated into NISO RP-25-2016, Outputs of the NISO Alternative Assessment Metrics Project, published in September 2016. It remains a voluntary recommended practice rather than an ANSI-accredited American National Standard — there is no conformance-testing process, and no vendor can be formally “certified” against it, a distinction worth noting given CASRAI’s own experience stewarding CRediT through the more formal ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 accreditation track.

Bibliometric vs. altmetric, in practice. The initiative’s outputs are easiest to place correctly by contrasting them with citation-based bibliometrics. A measure like the h-index counts formal scholarly citations accumulated slowly, over years, almost entirely from other researchers. The altmetrics this initiative studied instead track online attention — social media mentions, news coverage, policy-document citations, downloads, saves in reference managers — that can appear within hours of publication and comes from a much broader, non-specialist audience. NISO’s own working groups were explicit that altmetrics measure attention, not quality, and RP-25-2016 does not propose altmetrics as a replacement for citation-based measures like the h-index or the Journal Impact Factor concerns DORA raised — responsible-assessment frameworks generally treat the two families as complementary evidence, not substitutes for one another.

As of 2026, RP-25-2016 remains NISO’s only formal altmetrics recommended practice; no revised edition has been published since 2016, and NISO’s own retrospective, “The Rise and Fall of Altmetrics” (2017), reflects candidly on the field’s cooling interest after the initiative concluded. The initiative’s practical legacy is narrower and more durable than its name suggests: a shared vocabulary (Working Group A), an output-type/persistent-identifier framework (Working Group B), and a transparency disclosure mechanism several altmetrics aggregators still reference (Working Group C) — not an ongoing standards program.