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.
About PIRUS2
Until now the most granular level at which COUNTER requires reporting of usage is at the individual journal
level. Demand for usage statistics at the individual article level from users has, until recently, been low.
This, combined with the unwieldiness of usage reports in an Excel environment, has meant that COUNTER has
given a low priority to usage reports at the individual article level. A number of recent developments have,
however, meant that it may now be appropriate to give a higher priority to developing a COUNTER standard for
the recording, reporting and consolidation of usage statistics at the individual article level. Most important
among these developments are:
- Growth in the number of journal articles hosted by institutional and other repositories, for which no widely
accepted standards for usage statistics have been developed
- A Usage Statistics Review, sponsored by JISC under its Digital Repositories programme 2007-8, which,
following a workshop in Berlin in July 2008, proposed an approach to providing item-level usage statistics
for electronic documents held in digital repositories
- Emergence of online usage as an alternative, accepted measure of article and journal value and usage-based
metrics being considered as a tool to be used in the UK Research Excellence Framework and elsewhere
- Authors and funding agencies are increasingly interested in a reliable, global overview of usage of individual articles
- Implementation by COUNTER of XML-based usage reports makes more granular reporting of usage a practical proposition
- Implementation by COUNTER of the SUSHI (3) protocol facilitates the automated consolidation of large volumes of
usage data from different sources
- It should be noted that the outputs of PIRUS (the XML schema for the individual article usage reports, the tracker
code and the associated protocols) are already being implemented by publishers and repositories (e.g. PLoS and SURF).
It is important that these are fully tested and, if necessary, refined, before they are too widely adopted
Aims & Objectives
The aim of the PIRUS2 Project is to enable publishers, repositories and other organizations to generate and share
authoritative, trustworthy usage statistics for the individual articles and other items that they host.
In order to achieve this overall aim, the project has the following main objectives:
- Develop a suite of free, open source programmes to support the generation and sharing of COUNTER compliant usage
data and statistics that can be extended to cover any and all individual items in repositories
- Develop a prototype article level Publisher/Repository statistics service
- Define a core set of standard usage statistics reports that repositories should produce for internal and external consumption
Project management
Mimas (University of Manchester) has overall responsibility for PIRUS2, while the day-to-day management will be handled by the
Project Manager, based at Cranfield University. The other organizations represented on the project team are: COUNTER, CrossRef
and Oxford University Press.
The members of the PIRUS2 project team are:
- Simon Bevan (Cranfield University) - Senior Project Manager
- Richard Gedye (Oxford University Press)
- Ross MacIntyre (Mimas)
- Paul Needham (Cranfield University) - Project Manager
- Ed Pentz (CrossRef)
- Peter Shepherd (COUNTER)
Timescale of the project
PIRUS2 commenced in October 2009 and ended in February 2011. The PIRUS2 Final Report was released in October 2011.
