"IRUS provides standardised and cleaned data that is not overinflated"
The challenge
The OAPEN Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to open access, peer-reviewed books. OAPEN provides an open infrastructure to support the transition to open access for academic books, working with publishers, libraries and research funders.
OAPEN needs to provide reports on use of books and chapters to their different stakeholder groups. In the past, reports have been generated and sent manually, but this was very time intensive. OAPEN wanted to develop a more efficient way to share reliable usage data with their stakeholders.
The solution
To address the challenge of producing these regular reports in a more time-efficient way, they worked with a third party, to develop a usage dashboard based on the COUNTER conformant usage statistics supplied by IRUS. The IRUS API was one of the key components that made this possible.
"Obtaining the IRUS data is the easy bit"
The dashboard combines various data sources to generate a complete picture for publishers and funders. It ingests IRUS data, using the IRUS API, and each user gets their own login to view their own data. Funders, publishers and librarians can filter the data in slightly different ways.
IRUS provides OAPEN with usage at the country level, which enables the dashboard to display location-based usage. The dashboards for publishers and funders are based on the collection of titles made available in the OAPEN Library. For libraries, the dashboard offers an overview based on the IP addresses of their organisation and an additional location-specific view. Here, the usage within a circle of 20, 50, or 100 kilometres of the library's physical location can be shown.
Images supplied by OAPEN.
The online dashboard was launched during the UKSG 2022 Annual Conference. This is available to publisher, funder and library stakeholders. The data in the dashboard is updated each month.
The impact
The OAPEN dashboard is already being used by over 200 publishers, libraries and funders, providing a simple level of data to satisfy stakeholders' reporting needs and a standardised approach that enables collaborative projects.
IRUS supplies the dashboard with robust, trustworthy data that allows the OAPEN team to share this information with confidence and saves them time in cleaning data. By sharing credible and consistent data, OAPEN can encourage more people to work with them to produce OA titles.
"We can present the usage data to show the benefits of working with us. Although we know the stats are more conservative when compared to Google Analytics, IRUS gives us confidence that the data we share is standardised and not inflated by bots. It builds trust with our customers."