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Public Library of Science (PLOS) is the first publisher to place transparent and comprehensive information about the usage and reach of published articles onto the articles themselves, so that the entire academic community can assess their value. These Article-Level Metrics (ALM) are distinct from the journal-level measures of research quality that have traditionally been made available.

The Ruby on Rails application Article-Level Metrics was started in March 2009. It allows a user to aggregate relevant performance data on research articles including online usage, citations, social bookmarks, comments and blog coverage. PLOS is continuing to expand the Article-Level Metrics application because articles should be considered on their own merits, and the impact of an individual article should not be determined by the journal in which it happened to be published. As a result, PLOS hopes that new ways of measuring and evaluating research quality (or ‘impact’) can and will evolve.

To facilitate the dissemination of Article-Level Metrics, PLOS has made this application available as Open Source software under the Apache 2.0 license. To get started, users can

• Browse or search articles, or look at the most popular articles by source
• Use the API to collect information about individual articles, or a set of articles
• Install the Article-Level Metrics application to collect their own metrics

Use the documentation for more information on these topics. To use the API, please sign in with your Github account and use the API key generated for you. To learn how PLOS uses Article-Level Metrics, see http://article-level-metrics.plos.org/. For technical questions regarding the Article-Level Metrics application, visit the PLOS API Developers Google Group.