Metrics for openness

The characterisation of scholarly communication is dominated by citation-based measures. In this paper we propose several metrics to describe different facets of open access and open research. We discuss measures to represent the public availability of articles along with their archival location, licences, access costs and supporting information. Calculations illustrating these new metrics are presented using the authors’ publications. We argue that explicit measurement of openness is necessary for a holistic description of research outputs.