In the UK, there has been a concerted effort to get at a standardisation for institutional repository metrics and a way to report out usage of institutional repositories that is equal to Project COUNTER. The initial testing was called PIRUS2 and was undertaken by a select group of repositories within the UK prior to 2012.

The primary aims and objectives of PIRUS2 were to assess the feasibility of and develop the technical, organizational and economic models for the recording, reporting and consolidation of usage of journal articles hosted by publishers, institutional repositories and subject repositories.

PIRUS2 Final Report: http://www.projectcounter.org/News/Pirus2_oct2011.pdf

PIRUS2 achieved its aims by delivering a prototype statistics aggregation service, comprising:

• usage data and statistics from publishers and institutional repositories

• a practical organizational model based on co-operation between data processing suppliers

• data management and auditing services that meet the requirement for an independent, trusted and reliable service

• an economic model that provides a cost-effective service and a logical, transparent basis for allocating costs among the different users of the service.

PIRUS2 proposed the establishment of a global central clearing house (CCH) to deliver such a service. Unfortunately, it became clear from a survey conducted at the end of the project that the majority of publishers were not, largely for economic reasons, yet ready to implement or participate in such a service.

As part of UK RepositoryNet+, the JISC-funded repository and infrastructure service, IRUS-UK is a new approach to providing standards based statistics for repositories. It is hoped that by basing IRUS-UK on the PIRUS2 project, repositories will be able to use reliable data to benchmark across institutions. This compliments the raw data that many repositories use such as Google Analytics etc.

Thus, IRUS-UK is UK national aggregation service processes COUNTER-compliant statistics. Repositories are then able to run a number of reports on the data for their own use as well as being able to benchmark across other participating institutions.It is anticipated that IRUS-UK will include repositories from the majority of UK higher education (HE) institutions. By eliminating duplication of effort, IRUS-UK will offer cost and time efficiencies for participating institutions together with the benefits of a shared national service. In theory, every institution could produce its own COUNTER-compliant statistics for its repository.

The rules for eliminating robot accesses and double-clicks and for counting downloads are not that difficult to understand or implement. However, there is more to COUNTER compliance than simply following the COUNTER Code of Practice. In order to become truly COUNTER compliant, it is necessary to go through a regular auditing process. By the time registration, annual membership and report auditing fees are taken into account; this can potentially cost several thousands of pounds per year per IR. By collecting and processing download data into COUNTER statistics on behalf of IRs, IRUS-UK can substantially reduce these costs; in this scenario, only IRUS-UK itself needs to be audited and not individual repositories.

Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for e-Resources allows for the article-level usage tracking of Gold OA Articles through the standard; JR1 GOA. This metric will be extremely helpful in showing how gold open access articles are utilised at any given institution. These statistics will become increasingly important for librarians to review both for understanding their local academic environment in regards to open access usage but also in future negotiation with commercial publishers for possible changes to the standard subscription models currently in place.

6.1 Addition of global OA Content to library catalogues & discovery systems
6.2 Participation in OAISter
6.3 Necessary Metadata
6.4 Exposure of local repository on Google
6.5 Indexing of gold OA journals and the need for OA designation
6.6 Usage data (PIRUS, IRUS-UK, COUNTER 4)

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