Speaker
Dimitrios Pierrakos
(ATHENA Research and Innovation Center)
Description
**Overview of the proposed presentation / session / poster / demo**
Evaluation of scholarly impact has a strong influence on the assessment of the scholarly ecosystem, such as authors, publishers and institutions. With the advent of scholarly communication in the web new types of research output have evolved and in addition to conventional metrics new web based indicators have been developed. However there is a strong need to overcome limitations regarding accessibility, coverage of research output types and disciplines in metrics that prevent such evaluations to be performed in a transparent, robust and reproducible way. The main topic of this presentation, is the Usage Statistics Service developed in the context of the OpenAIRE project. The service aims to address the requirements mentioned above and offers an integrated infrastructure for assessing scholarly information.
**How does your submission address the conference themes and the topics of the track?**
The key challenge for usage statistics as a contribution to impact evaluation is the generation of comparable, consistent, standards based usage statistics across publishing platforms that take into account different levels of scholarly information: the usage of data sources, the usage of individual items in the context of their resource type, the usage of individual web resources or files and the usage of resources among different repositories.
Towards tackling this challenge, we will discuss the methodology of the OpenAIRE’s Usage Statistics Service for tracking, collecting, processing and analyzing usage activity from the network of OpenAIRE’s data providers. We will exploit the evaluation metrics, such as scholar items’ downloads and metadata views and how these metrics are calculated and presented using guidelines for consistent and credible usage data, such as the COUNTER Code of Practice. We will also present how the OpenAIRE’s distributed network of data providers allows aggregation by the service, of statistics about usage activity, published in several places.
We will present the impact of both manifestations of the service, i.e., the complete methodology and the aggregation of usage statistics. We will discuss its significance for different stakeholders, given that for non-traditional output types (e.g. research data, research software), usage statistics are often the only indicator available, while the implementation of data citation standards lags behind.
In particular, we will show how repository managers and hosting institutions can use the service as a tool to evaluate the success of their publication infrastructures. Authors and readers can exploit the popularity of an individual item among others. Finally, funding authorities can be informed in research evaluation processes, in addition to other traditional (e.g. citation counts) and alternative metrics (e.g. blogs, social activity, etc).
We will discuss how the Usage Statistics Service is aware of the sensitivity of usage data and the legal constraints that should be considered regarding the EU Data Protection Directive and policies on the national level.
**Who is the intended audience for your presentation/session/etc?**
Publishers, funders, repository managers, research administrators
| Topic Area | Impact evaluation and metrics |
|---|---|
| Type of abstract | Presentation (15 minutes) |
Primary author
Dimitrios Pierrakos
(ATHENA Research and Innovation Center)
Co-author
Mr
Jochen Schirrwagen
(Bielefeld University)
