Supporting research analytics by OpenAIREs usage statistics hub

Abstract

Usage metrics about all kinds of scholarly output are one of the measures to assess Open Access impact and are a value added service of Open Access repositories. OpenAIRE2020 is running usage data pilots that monitors and analyzes usage information, as well exploits usage metrics like views and downloads as complements to other scientific metrics. However, user activity is not limited in the traditional ways of accessing scholar information and the current diversity of the scholarly ecosystem implies a variety of alternative metrics for measuring impact. Therefore a strong need arises to develop complementary metrics for impact and quality which are less simplistic, more reliable and open for use and reuse. OpenAIRE2020 will do this by monitoring and analyzing repository usage data and exploiting not only usage metrics like downloads and metadata views, but also combine these metrics with the new ways of usage activity, i.e. the social content. In this manner OpenAIRE2020 will operate as a hub of repository usage statistics to the other article level metrics. Usage data will be collected in two ways: (1) by embedding tracking page tags in Open Access repositories which notify OpenAIRE's gathering service of the usage events, and (2) (national) usage statistics aggregators (e.g. IRUS-UK) exposing consolidated statistics via SUSHI-Lite. The final outcome is an OpenAIRE service for tracking, collection, cleaning, analysis, evaluation and COUNTER-compliant reporting of the usage data. The poster will describe two aspects: 1) The potential of the OpenAIRE Usage Statistics service to explore a number of multidimensional scholarly performance indicators linking Open Access with social and economic impact. 2) Contributing as a Usage Statistics Hub to services aggregating article-level metrics. Acknowledgments: European Commission H2020, Contract (GA) n.: 643410, OpenAIRE2020