When we began our work on the TOME Impact Working Group, we tried to articulate a framework to help shape our work.
As part of an initiative to explore the potential benefits of open access modes for disseminating academic monographs, we have found ourselves returning to basic questions about how we want to measure and understand what it is we do when we send a monograph out into the world. Every book is created from our basic scholarly impulse to enrich some aspect of the complex world we share. Yet when we seek to tell the story of its impact, we too often rely on narrow, dull, and/or inadequate measures — citation counts; print runs; downloads.
One way to shift this tendency to narrow and flatten the scope of scholarly impact is to give it more texture by identifying a wider range of possible audiences capable of creating transformative public communities. ...
