Scholarly Metrics Recommendations for Research Libraries: Deciphering the trees in the forest

The digital era has brought new and exciting changes to scholarly communication. Modern scientific libraries and information infrastructures are obliged to face these new challenges in a professional way sooner rather than later.The monitoring and execution of policies, the facilitation of Open Access publishing, and support for research data management are but a few examples of adaptation to the digital era. The use of scholarly metrics is also an emerging field for academic libraries, brought on by digital change. To foster this vision, LIBER's Innovative Metrics Working Group has set out recommendations on how academic libraries and information infrastructures can deal with scholarly metrics, and how to get started with the development of services to support this.

The recommendations are grouped into four sections:

1. Discovery and Discoverability
2. Showcasing Achievements
3. Service Development
4. Research Assessment

Each section covers a set of activities, and makes suggestions for libraries which want to promote the transparent, standardized and responsible use of scholarly metrics. As part of LIBER’s focus on Open Science, the Working Group has placed a special emphasis on recommendations addressing open scholarly metrics. Throughout this report, we have organised our recommendations into three levels. Which recommendations a library adopts will depend on their current level of engagement with scholarly metrics. The levels are as follows:

• Initial Steps (circular bullet)
• Intermediate Steps (square bullet)
• Advanced Steps (triangular bullet)

The order in which the recommendations appear are in correlation with the potential importance they can have for an institution. These two indications of use were developed during the Working Group’s workshop during LIBER’s 2017 Annual Conference. They are there to assist in prioritizing, but are not mandatory to follow and are not dependent on each other.