In our last post, we hinted at the cool new set of features we’re rolling out over the next month as part of our Five Meter release.   We wanted to give you the inside scoop on these features before their debut and get your feedback!

Easier import to Impactstory, and keeping your profile more up-to-date

We know how much of a pain it is to keep your CV up-to-date, so we’re going to make Impactstory that much better at keeping your it current, without the need for you to do much (if anything at all).

We’re currently exploring routes to implementation that include:

• Increasing the speed with which we sample third-party sites like Figshare and ORCID, so there’s less of a lag between when new products are added to those sites and when they appear on Impactstory. (That lag is currently one week, which is awesome for many of our users, but could be improved upon.)

• Allowing you to email us a link or citation to a new product

• Allowing you to tweet at us with certain hashtags and links to new products

Assuming you have to do anything at all to update your Impactstory profile, how would you prefer to do it? Forwarding manuscript acceptance emails? A bookmarklet a la Mendeley? What’s the easiest and least-hassle way we could do this for you?

Upload OA versions of your papers directly to Impactstory

This was one of the most wanted features mentioned in recent user interviews. And since we’re aiming to make Impactstory a solid replacement for scientists’ online web presence and CV, it follows that we should debut a feature that will allow researchers to share their work like they would on their website, but with less hassle.

What we’re most excited about for this feature debut is the ability to now track pageview and download counts for content that previously couldn’t be easily tracked on scientists’ websites.

The feature won’t provide permanent IDs like DOIs for uploaded content, nor will it provide full-scale archival preservation for content for now (like Figshare and many institutional repositories currently do, thanks to partnerships with CLOCKSS, etc). But we (like many of you) believe in the importance of permanent IDs and digital preservation. We’ll be keeping those issues in mind for future improvements and listening to see how much demand there is from users like you.

Ability to customize your profile’s appearance

You’ll soon be able to prioritize content and choose what people can see on your Impactstory profile, including current profile content and also new types of content that we’re calling widgets (think WordPress widgets).

Some widgets we’re aiming to debut include: the ability to feature a paper or product you’re proud of (as well as their metrics), a “bio” section, a research interests section, and integration with your blog.

Are there other uses for a customizable UI or types of widgets you’d love to see?

We’re also going to reformat profile badges to make ‘em more informative: the reformat will include the actual metrics themselves, percentile information, and possibly other information.

The customizable UI feature debut, as a whole, will set the stage for an oft-requested feature: the ability to group products into research packages.

Cool, so what’s next?

We’re going to start rolling this features out ASAP–the upload feature will likely be the first to happen, and it might happen later this week. We’re aiming to have all of these implemented by September 15.

We’d love to get your feedback in the comments on the questions we pose here, and welcome your thoughts over on the Feedback Forum on new features to consider implementing in our next sprints.