REQ- 6505409- S.O.W.pdf

ATTACHMENT 1

Statement of Work: Social Media Tracking & Analysis for EHP

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) supports the publication of a scholarly journals program, currently consisting of the flagship journal Environmental Health

Perspectives (EHP) and the companion journal Journal of Health and Pollution (JHP). These publications, under the program banner of EHP, are scholarly, online-only journals posted in a continuous publication format. Since publication is supported by the Federal government, content published in EHP and JHP is completely open access, and is free of any author publication charges or page/graphics fees.

EHP seeks to obtain data on which social media and news sources (Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, major news outlets, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit) are being used to make reference to, cite, or share materials published in EHP journals, and assign an impact score to indicate the popularity of each article in comparison to other articles published by both the EHP program and other publishers. These data will also be supplied for scholarly, scientific, and/or biomedical journals that both do and do not compete with EHP, and scored on the same scale.

The scale must be considered meaningful within the scholarly publishing community—EHP will not promote this as a new standard.

Tracking journal impact via social media and news sources is a specialized service. We need a tracking system—a scholarly publishing software service that crawls the web and looks for mentions, shares, and citations of published scholarly content in articles, blog posts, tweets, Facebook posts, etc.—that mention our publication. Due to EHP’s unique News product, we need the service to appropriately track its performance and popularity, in order to make good decisions about future article topics and marketing plans. This publishing metric can enrich our value to authors and end users as well as provide invaluable applications of data within NIEHS.

It is essential that the product and its scores, and the service provider, be recognized within the scholarly journal publishing industry as an authority in this field. EHP does not publish in a vacuum, and its publications need to be appropriately ranked against content from other specialized scientific publishers. Respondents must offer an existing platform for tracking and rating this information, and must provide in-use, real-world, live examples of how other publishers that compete with EHP are making similar use of their service, and publicly available webpages where scores are displayed for content from other publishers. Services that do not meet this criteria will not be considered.

Technical Requirements

The EHP journals publishing program requires a service that will automatically track citations, shares, and mentions of all articles published in EHP and JHP (and any future journals started or acquired by our program), as well as provide unabridged access to that data to readers via the

EHP program website. No action by EHP staff should be required to initiate the tracking for any particular article, aside from publishing the article and registering its DOI. The data will be made available to readers by clicking on a badge or logo designed and provided by the service, and called into the article page via a publicly available API. The logo or badge must be recognized within the scientific publishing industry as an accepted way to access records on social media usage and citation. The logo must display a “score” for each article that reflects how frequently the article has been cited or shared via social media, and this score must be weighted to reflect the relative importance or reach of different types of social media platforms. That weighting must not be unique to EHP articles, and must be applied to all articles tracked by the service. The weighting algorithm must be made publicly available on the service provider’s website.

EHP’s existing web contractors will be responsible for ensuring the code to display the logo is correctly added to relevant article pages on our sites.

Once the logo is clicked, the reader should be taken to a page listing all the social media sources that cite or link to this article. The list must be far more detailed than a simple set of URLs: it must be organized by service type (News, Twitter, Blogs, Wikipedia, etc.); must include the title of the article or share, name of the platform or service it was published to, publication date, citation information, and a brief excerpt of the article; and logo of the service being tracked, if available. In addition, the page must clearly indicate how this article ranks against other articles being tracked by the service. This page will not be hosted by EHP, and should not attempt to make use of any government web services or web support mechanisms. No user accounts or logins must be necessary to access this page—it must be provided publicly, with unlimited views.

In addition to the reader-focused services, the service provider must also provide this information via a publisher-focused, web-based interface. The interface must provide access to the full database of content being tracked by the service, allowing EHP to review the media impact of content it has published, content published by its competitors, and content published by other scholarly journals that do not necessarily compete with EHP via browse and search mechanisms.

There should be no charges for performing searches beyond the normal annual contract fee

(essentially, the service must allow unlimited searches), and the interface must act as a self-service portal; services that require EHP to contact their support staff to initiate or configure a search will not be considered. Simple and advanced search options must be provided; the advanced search should provide the ability to limit searches via publication date, dates when social media activity took place, ISSN, ISBN, name of journal, DOI, PubMed ID, preprint ID, and journal category. All data should be exportable to either CSV or Excel format for further analysis. Configurable email alerts must also be provided for the publisher, based on updates to saved searches. These data will not be publicly available, and will instead be accessed via username/passwords by designated EHP program staff only. EHP requests a total of at least eight (8) user accounts to access the interface.

The service must provide basic aggregate data about the users who post about EHP journals via social media, including country of origin and basic audience information about the service. No individual user tracking information should be provided.

The data provided by the service must be updated in real time, and must initiate tracking immediately after publication and DOI registration.

The service must be focused on the scholarly journal publishing market. EHP is not interested in any tracking system that is not currently available to the scientific journal publishing community, as the service must be recognized and trusted by authors, readers, and publishers in the scholarly journal publishing ecosystem. The tracked data should be accurate and complete. Providers must have a measure in place to identify and correct improper inflation or manipulation of tracked data.

Qualitative data presentation alongside metrics will develop a more compelling case for the content of the research and its impact. Knowing where the mentions were made shows the impact in relation to the importance. For instance, mentions in the New York Times would trump mentions in the News & Observer newspaper in Raleigh, NC.

Timeline and Transition

EHP seeks to fully implement this system in January 2023. The HTML code to include the badges will be posted by our contractors in charge of the EHP program website. Once procured, this will be implemented immediately on our website by the current contractors.