Category Archives: oa.counter

Who’s afraid of open infrastructures? | Research Information

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“Joanna Ball, Yvonne Campfens and Tasha Mellins-Cohen underline the importance of non-profit infrastructure and standards bodies…

both COUNTER and DOAJ are essential components of the knowledge ecosystem – but new challenges arise and new organisations are needed to help meet them. In 2018 the idea for the OA Switchboard (https://www.oaswitchboard.org/) was conceived to allow publishers, libraries and research funders to easily share information about OA publications throughout the publication journey, synchronising data from a multitude of systems and processes that would otherwise have to be manually connected within each separate organisation.

What do these organisations have in common? We are all owned and led by our community, and we’re not for sale or for profit. We are foundational open infrastructure and standards bodies, operating behind the scenes with low budgets and limited staffing – none of us have salespeople, marketing teams, exhibition budgets or in-house technology support. We collaborate with one another and with bigger bodies like Crossref, ORCID and NISO to create the foundations on which much scholarly infrastructure relies.

 

And foundations is absolutely the right word: scholarly communications is an exciting and innovative space with new commercial and non-commercial services springing up almost daily. We deliver value through open infrastructure, data and standards, and naturally services and tools have been built by commercial and not-for-profit groups that capitalise on our open, interoperable data and services – many of which you are likely to recognise and may use on a regular basis….”

IRUS-UK | Jisc

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“IRUS (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) enables institutional repositories (IRs) to share and expose statistics based on the COUNTER standard. It provides an aggregated view of repository usage to benefit organisations, it offers opportunities for benchmarking, and acts as an intermediary between repositories and other agencies.

IRUS collects raw usage data from IRs and processes these data into COUNTER-conformant usage statistics. This provides repositories with comparable, authoritative, standards-based usage data.

IRUS is a community-driven development, responding to user needs….”

IRUS-UK | Jisc

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“IRUS (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) enables institutional repositories (IRs) to share and expose statistics based on the COUNTER standard. It provides an aggregated view of repository usage to benefit organisations, it offers opportunities for benchmarking, and acts as an intermediary between repositories and other agencies.

IRUS collects raw usage data from IRs and processes these data into COUNTER-conformant usage statistics. This provides repositories with comparable, authoritative, standards-based usage data.

IRUS is a community-driven development, responding to user needs….”

PLOS Achieves Usage Reporting Milestone

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The Public Library of Science (PLOS) today announced that it is the first wholly Open Access (OA) publisher to deliver Release 5 COUNTER-compliant usage reporting to the library community. This is an important milestone in the development of usage reporting that meets the growing needs of the OA movement.

Next generation Open Access analytics: A case study – IOS Press

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Abstract:  A critical component in the development of sustainable funding models for Open Access (OA) is the ability to communicate impact in ways that are meaningful to a diverse range of internal and external stakeholders, including institutional partners, funders, and authors. While traditional paywall publishers can take advantage of industry standard COUNTER reports to communicate usage to subscribing libraries, no similar standard exists for OA content. Instead, many organizations are stuck with proxy metrics like sessions and page views that struggle to discriminate between robotic access and genuine engagement.

This paper presents the results of an innovative project that builds on existing COUNTER metrics to develop more flexible reporting. Reporting goals include surfacing third party engagement with OA content, the use of graphical report formats to improve accessibility, the ability to assemble custom data dashboards, and configurations that support the variant needs of diverse stakeholders. We’ll be sharing our understanding of who the stakeholders are, their differing needs for analytics, feedback on the reports shared, lessons learned, and areas for future research in this evolving area.

IRUS-US: Institutional Repository Usage Statistics Service

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“LYRASIS is partnering with Jisc to form and administer a new IRUS-US community of users. Institutions participating in IRUS-US install the IRUS tracker, allowing Jisc to collects raw download data for all item types and processes those raw data into COUNTER-conformant statistics. Those statistics are aggregated in open access statistical reports, allowing institutions to: share usage information with individual researchers; share usage information with administration; compare usage information with peer institutions; and use usage information to identify national trends.

IRUS-US functions as a small piece of code that is added to IR, enabling a ‘tracker protocol’ that allows Jisc to collect the raw data. Current compatible IR softwares include Dspace, Eprints, Fedora, Figshare, Haplo, Pure portal, Worktribe, Equella and Esploro. Any institution using a software not listed above should contact LYRASIS and indicate their interest, and we will do our best to encourage the software creators to add IRUS tracker functionality into their software capabilities.”

IRUS-US: Institutional Repository Usage Statistics Service

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“LYRASIS is partnering with Jisc to form and administer a new IRUS-US community of users. Institutions participating in IRUS-US install the IRUS tracker, allowing Jisc to collects raw download data for all item types and processes those raw data into COUNTER-conformant statistics. Those statistics are aggregated in open access statistical reports, allowing institutions to: share usage information with individual researchers; share usage information with administration; compare usage information with peer institutions; and use usage information to identify national trends.

IRUS-US functions as a small piece of code that is added to IR, enabling a ‘tracker protocol’ that allows Jisc to collect the raw data. Current compatible IR softwares include Dspace, Eprints, Fedora, Figshare, Haplo, Pure portal, Worktribe, Equella and Esploro. Any institution using a software not listed above should contact LYRASIS and indicate their interest, and we will do our best to encourage the software creators to add IRUS tracker functionality into their software capabilities.”

Reporting Global Usage and Usage of Open Content Not Attributed to Institutions

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“The COUNTER Code of Practice currently states about the Institution_Name in the report header that ‘For OA publishers and repositories, where it is not possible to identify usage by individual institutions, the usage should be attributed to “The World”’ (Section 3.2.1, Table 3.f). When this rule was added the focus was on fully Open Access publishers, and the expectation – which obviously was wrong and has caused some confusion – was that the fully OA publishers would not try to attribute usage to institutions. So, a report to “The World” was intended to include all global usage, whether attributed to institutions or not.

This document shows how usage could be reported to “The World” and how the global usage could be broken down and filtered.

Please note, that these reports would NOT be a mandatory requirement. Those content providers that wished to use them, could do so.

We are seeking your thoughts about how useful these reports might be, and more specifically on some of the technical details. Please provide your feedback at https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/3CQZVH2  The survey questions are included at the end of this document, so that you can discuss them with colleagues before submitting your responses online….”

Open access book usage data – how close is COUNTER to the other kind?

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Abstract:  In April 2020, the OAPEN Library moved to a new platform, based on DSpace 6. During the same period, IRUS-UK started working on the deployment of Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice (R5). This is, therefore, a good moment to compare two widely used usage metrics – R5 and Google Analytics (GA). This article discusses the download data of close to 11,000 books and chapters from the OAPEN Library, from the period 15 April 2020 to 31 July 2020. When a book or chapter is downloaded, it is logged by GA and at the same time a signal is sent to IRUS-UK. This results in two datasets: the monthly downloads measured in GA and the usage reported by R5, also clustered by month. The number of downloads reported by GA is considerably larger than R5. The total number of downloads in GA for the period is over 3.6 million. In contrast, the amount reported by R5 is 1.5 million, around 400,000 downloads per month. Contrasting R5 and GA data on a country-by-country basis shows significant differences. GA lists more than five times the number of downloads for several countries, although the totals for other countries are about the same. When looking at individual tiles, of the 500 highest ranked titles in GA that are also part of the 1,000 highest ranked titles in R5, only 6% of the titles are relatively close together. The choice of metric service has considerable consequences on what is reported. Thus, drawing conclusions about the results should be done with care. One metric is not better than the other, but we should be open about the choices made. After all, open access book metrics are complicated, and we can only benefit from clarity.

 

ResearchGate Partnership and COUNTER 5 Usage Reporting

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“In the first section of this 1-hour webinar, Sebastian Bock, Senior Product Manager in the Product & Platform Group at Springer Nature, will introduce details concerning the finalized agreement between Springer Nature and ResearchGate. In the second section guest speaker Michael Häusler, Head of Engineering Architecture at ResearchGate, will explain the technical aspects of the Springer Nature partnership with ResearchGate including data exchange, authentication and authorization processes. Sebastian will finish with a look at Springer Nature processes to support the agreement including a look at COUNTER 5 usage statistics reporting.”

PLOS and LibLynx partner to develop open access analytics | EurekAlert! Science News

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“The Public Library of Science (PLOS) and LibLynx announced a partnership today to develop ground-breaking analytics that better communicate the usage and impact of Open Access (OA) content.

A critical component in the development of sustainable funding models for OA is the ability to communicate impact in ways that are meaningful to a diverse range of internal and external stakeholders, including institutional partners, funders, and authors.

While traditional paywall publishers can take advantage of industry-standard COUNTER reports to communicate usage to subscribing libraries, no similar standard exists for OA content….”

PSI | OA Metrics Generator

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“This new tool from PSI generates open access usage statistics for publishers and university repositories. Partnership with Scholarly IQ ensures these metrics can be fully COUNTER compliant. With PSI’s OA Metrics Generator you can develop a deeper understanding of your organisational readership….”

Repository Implementation Webinar: March 26, 2019

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“Join us on March 26th at 8:00am PST/4:00pm GMT for a webinar on repository implementation of our COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data and Make Data Count recommendations. This webinar will feature a panel of developers from repositories that have implemented or about to release standardized data metrics: Dataverse, Dryad, and Zenodo. We will interview each repository on their implementation process. This recorded discussion between our technical team and repositories, providing various perspectives of implementation, should be a helpful guidance for any repository interested in implementing!…”

IRUS-UK

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“IRUS-UK (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics UK) is a Jisc-funded national aggregation service, which provides COUNTER-conformant usage statistics for all content downloaded from participating UK institutional repositories (IRs)….

The service consolidates COUNTER-conformant statistics providing opportunities to demonstrate the value and impact of IRs:

  • facilitates comparable, standards-based measurements
  • provides an evidence base for repositories to develop policies and initiatives to help support their objectives
  • provides consistent and comprehensive statistics, presenting opportunities for benchmarking at a national level
  • developing a user community that will ensure that the service is responsive to user requirements….”