IRUS-UK

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These pages are an archive of the PIRUS2 project, the predecessor of IRUS-UK, which started in Oct 2009 and successfully completed in Oct 2011.

PIRUS2

The Publisher and Institution Repository Usage Statistics (PIRUS2) project, which led directly to the development of IRUS-UK, aimed to develop a global standard to enable the recording, reporting and consolidation of online usage statistics for individual journal articles hosted by Institutional Repositories, Publishers and others.

The project was funded by Jisc as part of the funding programme: Information Environment Programme 2009-11

The PIRUS2 Project successfully completed and issued its final report in October 2011.

Download the PIRUS2 Final Report.

PIRUS2 built on the outcomes and recommendations of the original PIRUS (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) project, also funded by Jisc, which was completed in January 2009.

The original PIRUS project 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. If this is to be translated into a new, implementable COUNTER standard and protocol, further research and development will be required, specifically in the following areas:

Technical: further tests, with a wider range of repositories and a larger volume of data, will be required to ensure that the proposed protocols and tracker codes are scalable/extensible and work in the major repository environments.
Organizational: the nature and mission of the central clearing house/houses proposed in the original project has to be developed, and candidate organizations identified and tested
Economic: we need to assess the costs for repositories and publishers 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
Advocacy: the broad support of all the major stakeholder groups (repositories, publishers, authors) will be required. Intellectual property, privacy and financial issues will have to be addressed

Download the full report of the original PIRUS project PIRUS Final Report.

The objective of PIRUS2 was to address these issues and by doing so specify standards, protocols, an infrastructure and an economic model for the recording, reporting and consolidation of online usage of individual articles hosted by repositories, publishers and other entities.