The UsageCounts service is now offering the new usage statistics reports following the COUNTER Code of practice Release 5, which changes the way the usage events are collected, counted and published, by introducing new Concepts, Metric Types, and Reports.
As for Metric Types, the Release 5 Reports are dismissing the traditional views and downloads metrics, and introducing new metrics, the Investigations and Requests:
- An Investigation is tracked when a user performs any action in relation to a content item or title: View Abstract; View Article Preview; View HTML Full Text, View PDF; Download PDF.
- A Request is specifically related to viewing or downloading the full content item: View HTML Full Text, View PDF; Download PDF.
The following Metric Types are now available:
- Total Item Investigations: Counts total number of times information related to an article viewed (including all article full‐content views).
- Unique Item Investigations: Counts unique article investigations and requests in a user‐session.
- Total Item Requests: Counts all article full‐content views across all formats like HTML and PDF (This is equivalent to the Release 4 reports).
- Unique Item Requests: Counts unique article full‐content views in a given session regardless of format. If a user views an article PDF and HTML in the same session this would only count as 1.
As for the Reports, the following are now deployed in OpenAIRE PROVIDE dashboard:
- Platform Master Report: A report summarizing usage activity for the repository by month, metric type and item type (1)
- Platform Usage Report: A report summarizing usage activity for the repository by month, broken down by metric type
- Platform Master Item Report: A report for items requests by month metric type, item type (1) and repository
- Datasets Report: A report for datasets requests by month metric type and repository
(1) Item types: article, book, data, among other publication types
