Jisc's IRUS-UK (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics UK) is a national aggregation service, which provides COUNTER-conformant usage statistics for all content downloaded from participating UK institutional repositories (IRs). It is also part of the OpenAIRE usages statistics portal, as well as involved in several other international initiatives in the US, Australia, and New Zealand.

IRUS UK currently has 175 active repositories with over 1,925 million unique items that have been downloaded and over 230 million downloads as of the beginning of March 2020. From the beginning of 2020, IRUS now includes research data repositories as part of the full IRUS service, and it provides stats that conform to both the COUNTER R5 CoP and COUNTER CoP for Research Data. 

IRUS is also going to become an open access service in the next couple of months (Q2), so there will no longer be the need to use Shibboleth logins to view the data. It is combining this with being a COUNTER R5 ready service. COUNTER Release 5 supports recording of information about metadata views ‘Investigations’, in addition to downloads of full text items ‘Requests’. The team have updated their IRUS Tracker to accommodate this development. It currently has 115 (of the 175) who are R5 ready. All the repositories in IRUS can still receive stats data, but it is just that they have to be R5 ready to receive data on ‘Investigations’.