Institutional repositories and the item and research data metrics landscape

Abstract

The success of COUNTER in supporting adoption of a standard to measure e-resource usage over the past 15 years is apparent within the scholarly communications community. The prevalence of global OA policies and mandates, and the role of institutional repositories within this context, prompts demand for more granular metrics. It also raises the profile of data sharing of item-level usage and research data metrics. The need for reliable and authoritative measures is paramount. This burgeoning interest is complemented by a number of initiatives to explore the measurement and tracking of usage of a broad range of objects outside traditional publisher platforms. Drawing on examples such as OpenAIRE, IRUS-UK, Crossref’s Distributed Usage Logging and Event Data service and COAR Next Generation Repositories, this article provides a brief introduction and overview of developments in this area. This paper forms the basis of a session that was originally presented at the UKSG Annual Conference in Telford in April 2019.