How does OA-Statistics work?

OA-Statistics has developed robust infrastructure components for the purpose of gathering and processing usage data and -statistics from a wide variety of repositories.

Infrastructure

OA-Statistics' infrastructure is based on OAS data providers that gather the usage data at the individual repositories, process them, and make them available via a standardised interface. From there the data are harvested by a central OAS service provider that processes them and makes them available in a standardised way to the repositories and to value-added services.

OAS data provider

The OAS data providers record document usage in log files and pseudonymise user data (e.g., IP addresses). They process this usage information, adding unique document IDs and transforming the data into OpenURL Context Objects. Finally, these data are made available for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

The OAS data provider can be installed in just a few steps using the software packages provided by OA-Statistics. These packages are tailored to the most common repository systems.

OAS service provider

The data gathered are harvested and processed by a central OAS service provider in accordance with COUNTER, LogEc, and IFAB standards.

The data are cleansed of distortions caused by automated non-human (robot) accesses. Moreover, duplicate documents – accesses to the same document stored at different locations – are identified and merged. The resulting standardised usage data are then transferred back to the repositories, where they can be displayed or, for example, used to sort lists of search results.