Measuring the Usage of Repositories via a National Standards-based Aggregation Service: IRUS-UK

Many educational institutions have repositories for research outputs. The number of items available through institutional repositories is growing, and is expected to continue to do so due to requirements for outputs from public-funded research to be open access. But how much usage are institutional repositories and their individual items getting? The Jisc-funded service IRUS-UK is designed to help institutions understand more about the usage of their institutional repositories. IRUS-UK collects raw usage data from participating repositories and processes these into COUNTER-compliant statistics. This provides repositories with comparable, authoritative, standards-based data and opportunities for profiling and benchmarking. It enables institutions to run reports at both repository level (e.g. total download figures) and at item level. IRUS-UK utilises a robust, multistage ingest process, validating data, stripping out robot and unusual accesses, and filtering out double clicks, to transform raw usage data into COUNTER-compliant statistics. IRUS-UK currently has data from 83 UK institutional repositories (using Eprints, DSpace and Fedora software) and has recorded over 35 million downloads since July 2012. The data from IRUS-UK can be used to provide information for management reporting, for usage monitoring, and for external reporting. Data can be viewed within the online portal, downloaded for further analysis, or harvested using the SUSHI service (NISO Z39.93). IRUS-UK is also working with and contributing to other groups and initiatives involved in a range of activities relating to usage statistics. These include: the Distributed Usage Logging/CrossRef DOI Event Tracker Working Group, OpenAIRE2020 and COAR Working Group.