Usage data for open access books

OPERAS/HIRMEOS

Our Open Access books can be hosted on and downloaded from multiple different platforms including our own website, authors' websites and social media accounts, institutional and subject repositories, Google Books, unglue.it, the Classics Library, the Internet Archive, the OAPEN library, JSTOR and others. We have led the way in collecting and collating information from these platforms for the presentation of title-specific usage data on our website. In the process we have recognised the difficulties in trying to aggregate usage data across different platforms that each have their own ways of displaying the books, and use different tools to monitor usage.

As part of the EU funded HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science Infrastructure) project we have developed and extended our processes to create open source software and databases to collectively collect and host usage data from alternative platforms for multiple publishers. This has been designed to dovetail with citation and social media referral metrics being developed by Ubiquity Press, to create the OPERAS Metrics Portal.

Documentation and code for this project is available at https://metrics.operas-eu.org/docs/getting-started

We see this making two important contributions by:

  • defining an open data model for collecting and collating usage metrics data which we hope will be useful for other developers, and
  • providing open source code and database to enable publishers to implement the metrics service themselves.

Other resources associated with the development of the service