Abstract:
Sri Lankan universities have developed their institutional repositories to promote
communications of research findings among stakeholders. At present, universities’ strategic
plans inevitably include measures and actions to increase the webometric rankings of the
institution. This is partly achieved through accessible local research publications deposited
on self-archived platforms. Despite, to what extent the research and publication reach the
general public is the question. Most of these repositories use in-built metrics, visible only to
administrators and registered users who can view the number of downloads and data as
such. However, those analytics do not show the visibility of research among the general
public except for the system/database administrators. However, the paradigm shifted a few
years ago to adopt a holistic bibliometric to evaluate the research’s impact on society. The
majority of laypeople are active on social media and do not have access to almost any
scholarly resources available via expensive subscriptions. At this point, the authors propose
Altmetric tools to expand the author’s visibility on non-scholarly platforms such as mass and
social media. Almost all university libraries in Sri Lanka, run their repositories on DSpace
open-source software. Altmetric badges can be embedded into DSpace through the proper
configuration. By adding an Altmetric widget, popularly known as Altmetric doughnut, the
visibility of publications is expected to increase author’s visibility and his/her work on other
platforms, especially on social media. In this regard, the study proposes possibilities to
incorporate freely available webometric tools to make the research visible and viable in
society. An extensive research project will be planned and executed to assess the technical
compatibilities, challenges, and prospects of adding Altmetric tools to the Sri Lankan
university repositories.
