Pilot Project on “Alternative Metrics for Research” for Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)

ADVANCE CONTRACT AWARD NOTICE (ACAN)

1. Advance Contract Award Notice (ACAN)

 An ACAN is a public notice indicating to the supplier community that a department or agency intends to award a contract for goods, services or construction to a pre-identified supplier, thereby allowing other suppliers to signal their interest in bidding, by submitting a statement of capabilities. If no supplier submits a statement of capabilities that meets the requirements set out in the ACAN, on or before the closing date stated in the ACAN, the contracting officer may then proceed with the award to the pre-identified supplier.

2. Definition of Requirements

NRCan intends to conduct a feasibility "proof of concept" pilot with Altmetric (from Digital Science) to assess if their web-based research metrics application called "Explorer for Institutions" is potentially beneficial to NRCan's science and research community. The Altmetric "Explorer for Institutions" is a site-license access subscription platform that enables researchers to browse and report on all of the attention data for research published by their organization, and to benchmark this alongside other items in the Altmetric database.

 The objective of the work is to gather expert advice, experience the tools and visualize their potential use through a demo based on NRCan outputs. The work will also inform and contribute to ongoing assessments of alternative metrics and their value added for NRCan, specifically as relates to non-scholastic non-DOI (Digital Object Identifier) type outputs.

 Through this pilot, NRCan will obtain access to expertise, advice and tools including a demo portraying NRCan structure connected to knowledge products with DOIs from contract award to March 31st, 2018. Meetings with focus groups of NRCan experts and supplier experts, the associated demo, and access to the tool will allow for an assessment of the potential value added.

3. Criteria for Assessment of the Statement of Capabilities

Any interested supplier must demonstrate by way of a statement of capabilities that it meets the following requirements:

• Provide access to an on-line platform that allows NRCan to track "mentions" (in on-line "sources of attention" such as news, policy documents or social media) of NRCan knowledge products. These knowledge products can be scholastic/academic or not and can be comprised of such items as journal articles, factsheets, white papers, reports, etc. in various sources of on-line attention via digital object identifier (DOI) tracking and via Uniform Resource Locator (URL) tracking for items with no DOIs, in a transparent fashion.
• Allow NRCan to view activity (that has not involved NRCan) on a certain topic e.g. energy, environment, mining, forestry…and allows NRCan to identify the organization responsible for the activity.
• Incorporation of policy documents, news, blogs and popular social media platforms in the on-line source
• Include flexibility to add or modify the list of tracked sources. The platform must enable the identification of online reader behaviour, allow network interactions with content, social media references, and online content management.
• Be able to develop the functionality (within one month of contract award) for the on-line platform to portray the structure of NRCan to enable customized reporting. This would also have to allow for adjustments. This must be developed within one month of contract award and allow for adjustments.
• Include platform functionality to platform for the discover knowledge products that have received on-line attention for specific issues and to provide a perspective of NRCan’s contribution on a specific issue by easily and readily allowing the identification of NRCan’s knowledge products.
• Allow for application programming interface (API) access in the platform
• Include a dashboard that is intuitive and easy to use.
• Include the ability to connect with the Federal Science Library (FSL).

4. Trade Agreements

N/A - Not Applicable

5. Justification for the Pre-Identified Supplier

 We intend to deal directly with the supplier mentioned in section 10 below as, it is the only known supplier that meets the mandatory criteria set out in section 3 above as well as provide the services described in Section 2.

 Should Canada receive a statement of capabilities from a supplier that contains sufficient information to indicate that it meets the requirements set forth in this ACAN, a competitive process will be triggered with a technical and financial evaluation methodology of the bids proposed by the potential bidders.

6. Exception to the Government Contracts Regulations

 The following exception(s) to the Government Contracts Regulations is (are) invoked for this procurement under subsection: 6(d) – “only one person is capable of performing the work).

 The identified provider, Altmetric from Digital Science is the only one able to meet all of the criteria identified in paragraph 3 above.

7. Exclusions and/or Limited Tendering Reasons

 N/A - Not applicable

8. Ownership of Intellectual Property

 Ownership of any Foreground Intellectual Property arising out of the proposed contract will vest in the Contractor.

9. Contract Period

 The contract period will be from contract award to March 31, 2018.

10. Estimated Cost

 The estimated maximum value of the contract including one (1) option period is $80,682.00 CAD (taxes included).

 The estimated cost of the pilot is set at $33,300.00 CAD. If the pilot is deemed successful, there is an option to extend the contract period for twelve months, for an additional estimated cost of $38,100.00 CAD for a total of $71,400.00 CAD (excluding taxes).

11. Name and Address of the Proposed Contractor

Digital Science

2nd Floor

625 Massachusetts Ave

Cambridge, MA

02139, USA

Monika Dunbar

Director, North American Non-Profit Funders and Provincial Governments

Digital Science

+1 202-681-2144

monika@uberresearch.com

12. Suppliers’ right to submit a statement of capabilities

 Suppliers who consider themselves fully qualified and available to provide the services/goods described herein, may submit a Statement of Capabilities in writing, preferably by e-mail, to the contact person identified in this Notice on or before the closing date and time of this Notice. The Statement of Capabilities must clearly demonstrate how the supplier meets the advertised requirements.

13. Closing Date

 The closing date for the submission of a statement of capabilities is January 12, 2018 at 14:00 Pacific Standard Time).

14. Contract Authority

Gerald Baran

Senior Procurement Officer

Natural Resources Canada

Finance and Procurement Branch

506 West Burnside Road

Victoria, British Columbia, V8Z 1M5

Telephone: 250-298-2502

Email: gerald.baran@canada.ca