The PIRUS 2 project has been launched.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
PIRUS 2, supported by JISC, the United Kingdom Joint Information Systems Committee, is a co-operative project involving repositories and publishers, which will develop a set of standards, protocols and processes to enable publishers, repositories and other organizations to generate and share authoritative, trustworthy usage statistics for the individual articles and other items that they host.
PIRUS 2 builds on the standards already established by COUNTER and on the results of the original PIRUS (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) project, which demonstrated that it is technically feasible to create record and consolidate usage statistics for individual articles using data from repositories and publishers, despite the diversity of organizational and technical environments in which they operate.
Until now the most granular level at which COUNTER requires reporting of usage is at the individual journal level. A number of recent developments have, however, means that it would now be appropriate to give a higher priority to developing a COUNTER standard for the recording, reporting and consolidation of usage statistics at the individual article level.
PIRUS 2 will seek to meet the following main objectives:
- Develop a suite of free, open source programmes to support the generation and sharing of COUNTER compliant usage data and statistics that can be extended to cover any and all individual items in institutional and subject repositories
- Develop a prototype article level Publisher/Repository usage statistics service Define a core set of standard usage statistics reports that repositories could/should produce for internal and external consumption
- Assess the costs for repositories and publishers of generating the required usage reports, as well as the costs of any central clearing house/houses; investigate how these costs could be allocated between stakeholders
