Beyond the journal: Inside the Altmetric Top 25 NTRO Repositories

November 10, 2025

Misha Kidambi

For decades, journal articles have been the gold standard of scholarly communication. And while they remain central to how academia measures impact, the landscape of research dissemination is shifting. Open repositories are playing a crucial role in this shift.

Today we release the Altmetric Top 25 NTRO Repositories, shining a spotlight on this shift. Compiled by Simon Porter, VP of Research Futures at Digital Science, the Top 25 highlights the most-discussed NTROs (non-traditional research outputs) of 2024 – from policy reports and datasets to creative and digital works that captured public attention around the world – and the repositories in which they can be found.

Platforms like Figshare, Zenodo, institutional and subject specific repositories have become the places from where research is discovered and disseminated. What began as storage for articles and datasets has evolved into hubs for all kinds of scholarly materials: reports, software, creative works, and more – materials referred to as NTROs.

Redefining what counts as research

NTROs encompass anything that falls outside the familiar formats of journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings. They include everything from policy evaluations and data visualizations to performances and digital exhibits.

NTROs often deliver insights that are timely, tangible, and directly relevant to practitioners, educators, and policymakers. And repositories make these works open, persistent, and discoverable, ensuring they are not just produced but seen and used.

Yet, for years, their influence remained largely invisible. Traditional metrics like citations couldn’t capture how a dataset shaped a public debate, or how a policy report informed national legislation. That’s where Altmetric began to change the picture.

Seeing engagement beyond citations

Altmetric tracks how research is discussed across the digital landscape: in news articles, policy documents, blogs, Wikipedia, and social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky. Institutional repositories in particular play a critical role in ensuring that NTRO works are connected to infrastructure like Almetric by assigning persistent identifiers (DOIs) to every output, which enables Altmetric to trace attention to NTROs in real time. This transforms the visibility framework for open research: repositories make outputs accessible, DOIs make them traceable, and Altmetric makes their influence visible. Unlike citation counts, which take years to build, Altmetric data captures engagement as it happens, revealing which ideas are sparking conversation today.

Mapping public attention

To explore this emerging layer of research visibility, Simon Porter, VP of Research Futures at Digital Science, used a snapshot from DataCite, included in the Australian National Persistent Identifier (PID) Benchmarking Toolkit – Final Report (October 2025).

He examined repositories indexed by DataCite, identified the highest Altmetric-scoring research output for each one in 2024, and filtered out journal articles to focus exclusively on NTROs, i.e., reports, datasets, and creative works.

“That this analysis is possible is due to the willingness of the institutional repository movement to recognise their role as serious publisher of research content, and publish their works with the same level of attention to global citation infrastructure as publishers use for journal articles,” Porter says.

“Although Almetric can also track handles, using DOIs – particularly those from DataCite that have been designed with the flexibility of NTROs in mind – not only enables NTROs to be more easily cited in the literature, it also enables the reach and engagement of repositories to be internationally compared.”

The result is the Altmetric Top 25 NTRO Repositories: a window into how open, non-journal research captured public attention over the past year.

What the Top 25 tell us

The findings highlight a clear trend: the most discussed outputs are those that tackle socially urgent and globally relevant issues.

Among the top-ranked examples:

#1: Stanford Digital Repository’s “Identifying and Eliminating CSAM (child sexual abuse material) in Generative AI Models” (AI Ethics, Online Safety) — Altmetric Score: 2343.75
#2: Zenodo (CERN)’s “Climate change opinion and recent presidential elections” (Climate Science, Politics) — Altmetric Score: 709.55
#3: Monash University (Figshare)’s “Young people’s perspectives on missing out on being young.” (Education, Youth Studies) — Altmetric Score: 589.00

“From AI ethics to climate policy and education, the pattern is unmistakable: when research speaks to public concerns, it travels further and faster,” Porter says. “Reports, datasets, and evaluations are being discussed in the news, cited in policy, and shared widely across social platforms. Open repositories, paired with Altmetric data, are proving to be the vital connectors between scholarship and society.”

Why this matters

As open access policies and persistent identifiers become standard across the research ecosystem, repositories are no longer simply archives, they have become amplifiers. They preserve outputs, but more importantly, they propel them into public and policy conversations.

By tracking attention, Altmetric helps researchers see who’s engaging with their work, institutions showcase broader impact, and funders trace tangible outcomes beyond academia. It’s a shift from measuring how much research is cited to understanding how research is used, discussed, and acted upon.

Repositories and Altmetric together illuminate a fuller, more dynamic picture of research visibility.

“In a connected world, where research is shared, debated, and remixed online, Altmetric provides the lens to see influence as it unfolds. Repositories ensure that outputs remain open and persistent; Altmetric ensures they are visible and understood,” Porter says.

“Together, they redefine impact, not just by what’s published, but by what’s noticed, shared, and is shaping the world.”