Workshop 2.3 | ReadMetrics: Aggregating and Sharing Usage Data for Electronic Resources
Date: Thursday 3 July 2025
Room: TBA
Speaker(s): TBA
During this workshop, a temporary “LIBER” space will be set up on ReadMetrics instance and let participants directly interact with dashboards that show multi-year spans of aggregated data, with different facets, useful both for institutional and consortial monitoring, trends and evaluation.
ReadMetrics(1) is a toolkit of modules and services focused on usage statistics of electronic resources that are developed in a close and fruitful collaboration between the Inist-CNRS(2) and the Couperin consortium(4) since 2013 and serving more than 200 institutions(4) as well as the network of French consortial negotiators for electronic resources subscriptions.
ReadMetrics aims to be a turnkey solution for:
- Monitoring transformative agreements, including before and beyond;
- Collecting and analyze 360° usage data across disciplines and consortia;
- Assessing value of publishing spend and enable comparative citation analysis.
It already contains field-tested free and open source elements, that can be used alone or in combination:
- ezPAARSE shows how patrons access subscribed electronic resources, it filters, extracts and enriches the access events found in log files from local servers and produces a result that - ezMESURE can ingest. Internationally disseminated, it benefits from an ongoing partnership with OCLC;
- ezMESURE operates as a central repository(5) for the usage statistics data produced by one or many ezPAARSE, as well as COUNTER5 usage data reports(6) harvested from publishers’ platforms;
- ezCOUNTER is responsible for collecting COUNTER identifiers, allowing the “harvesting” of all COUNTER reports(7) on behalf of participating institutions;
- ezREEPORT provides electronic resource managers with periodic usage data snapshots from predefined dashboards, directly by mail to save time and effort in mastering a tool that can seem complex;
- ezUnpaywall is a French operated mirror to the Unpaywall(8) database, used to enrich usage with metadata on the openness characteristics of the resources being accessed, at the time of the access.
ReadMetrics can be deployed and run by any institution or consortium subscribing to electronic resources for their patrons or members.
We think it could benefit a large number of institutions and consortia and wish to showcase its main features during a short and dynamic presentation showing the main screens of our consortial service.
Lastly, after more than 10 years running it on a consortial scale and with different partners, we would emphasize the main aspects that set a virtuous circle in motion and guarantees the relevance of such a service:
- An active community of users and beneficiaries is crucial and has to be animated: to provide up-to-date identifiers, to understand and check reports, to share experiences and use cases around usage, to work within dashboards;
- COUNTER provides a solid shared foundation and widespread tools to further characterize the uses of open science, like the Global Item Report (even if it is still optional). The more publishers and providers fully comply to the COUNTER standard, the easier it is to gather data on a large scale that is consistent, reliable and homogeneous from one publisher to another.
1) https://www.readmetrics.org/
2) https://www.inist.fr/
3) https://www.couperin.org/
4) https://ezmesure.couperin.org/partners
5) ezMesure is built upon the Elasticsearch engine and the Kibana data visualization dashboard software
6) https://www.countermetrics.org/
7) https://www.countermetrics.org/education/reports/
8) https://unpaywall.org/