Overton is a proud signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and we are committed to ensuring we operate within the framework it outlines. We want to be transparent about what that means in practice, so we have described below how each relevant section applies in Overton’s context and will keep this updated as the platform evolves.
11. Be open and transparent by providing data and methods used to calculate all metrics.
We are and will continue to be open about how we gather our data (see our commitments and our explanatory articles on help.overton.io). We do not currently provide any metrics, but if and when we do, where possible we will adhere to this principle.
12. Provide the data under a licence that allows unrestricted reuse, and provide computational access to data, where possible.
As a small company whose business model relies on proprietary data, we are not able to allow unrestricted reuse under the terms of our licence. However, we do provide computational access via API.
13. Be clear that inappropriate manipulation of metrics will not be tolerated; be explicit about what constitutes inappropriate manipulation and what measures will be taken to combat this.
We do not currently provide indicators or metrics within our platform but we know that some users want to use the data to create their own so we want to work closely with our clients and the wider sector to understand how this new type of data can be used responsibly. We’re at the start of our journey, and will be actively working to pioneer approaches and to create and share best practice around this.
14. Account for the variation in article types (e.g., reviews versus research articles), and in different subject areas when metrics are used, aggregated, or compared.
As our primary focus is on policy documents this criteria applies slightly differently to us. We do differentiate policy document types and any future indicators or metrics we produce are likely to be on this side rather than for journal articles. This is something we’ll be looking at in future.
Overton is committed to being a responsible data custodian – read about what this means here.