Research Projects

COUNTER is an active participant in research projects whose objectives are either to improve the quality of online usage statistics or to increase the relevance of usage data in the wider world of scholarly metrics. Below are listed research projects in which COUNTER is currently involved, together with links to further information on these projects.

Journal Usage Factor

In 2007 the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG), in association with COUNTER, published the results of a wide-ranging study which explored how online usage statistics might form the basis of a new, usage-based metric of journal quality. In Stage 1 of this project market research was carried out to examine ways in which journal quality is currently assessed and the degree to which any additional, usage-based metrics might prove valuable to authors, librarians, research institutions and funding agencies. Also investigated were practical ways in which such metrics might be derived and constructed to provide the maximum utility for all, within defined resource constraints.

Building upon the encouraging reactions revealed in the market research, Stage 2 of the project is developing a programme of data modelling and analysis that will use real usage data from a number of content providers, with the aim of identifying potential candidate metrics for longer-term scaled up testing.

This project is funded by UKSG, RIN (the Research Information Network), along with other industry bodies and publishers. Further in formation on this project is available on the UKSG website at: http://www.uksg.org/usagefactors

PIRUS2: Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics

PIRUS 2, supported by JISC, the United Kingdom Joint Information Systems Committee, is a co-operative project involving publishers and repositories, which will develop a set of standards, protocols and processes to enable publishers, repositories and other organizations to generate and share authoritative, trustworthy usage statistics for the individual articles and other items that they host.

PIRUS 2 builds on the standards already established by COUNTER and on the results of the original PIRUS project, which demonstrated that it is technically feasible to create record and consolidate usage statistics for individual articles using data from repositories and publishers, despite the diversity of organizational and technical environments in which they operate.

Until now the most granular level at which COUNTER has established standards for the reporting of usage is at the individual journal, database, or book level. A number of recent developments, however, mean that it may now be appropriate to give a higher priority to developing a COUNTER standard for the recording, reporting and consolidation of usage statistics at the individual article level.

PIRUS 2 will seek to meet the following main objectives:

• Develop a suite of free, open source programmes to support the generation and sharing of COUNTER compliant usage data and statistics that will cover individual items in publisher, aggregator, institutional and subject repositories
  

• Develop a prototype article level Publisher/Repository usage statistics service
  

• Define a core set of standard usage statistics reports that publishers and repositories could produce for internal and external consumption
  

• Assess the costs for publishers and repositories of generating the required usage reports, as well as the costs of any central clearing house/houses; investigate how these costs could be allocated between stakeholders.