Responding to Birmingham City University's request about interpreting non-COUNTER usage data:
You could ask the publishers in question to follow the COUNTER specifications (www.projectcounter.org) in the layout of reports but if you want to automatically harvest these then they will need a JSON (COUNTER 5) or XML (COUNTER 4) service to provide this.
It might however be simpler to ask these publishers to become compliant (apologies for the shameless self-promotion but we would be pleased to help). Are there good reasons why they can't? COUNTER compliant usage data can even be provided for OA publishers.
The other major consideration in this is whether these non-COUNTER usage statistics are even comparable in any way? COUNTER data has specific processing standards that ensures consistency, credibility and comparability, and providers are annually audited by 3rd parties for compliance. Non-COUNTER publishers may be providing usage data but what are these metrics (views, visits, impressions, pages, hits, requests, downloads etc) and how can you be confident in their veracity?
Having previously worked at an industry standards body for media metrics (www.abc.org.uk), I can say that looking to directly compare online metrics without an audited standard can have a wild variance (bot traffic alone can account for 60% of a site's traffic - https://bit.ly/2QuY4Sg) and it does a disservice to those publishers that do take the time and make the investment to meet these standards and support librarians with usable, accountable usage statistics.
Usage data is one of the key areas where the industry has pulled together from all sides to create a common, accessible standard and providing usage data that meets these standards helps to save a huge amount of resource on the librarian side (imagine pulling in thousands of different reports in different formats and replicating this at every library) whilst also giving data that is truly comparable. COUNTER standards makes everyones work that little bit easier and enables decisions to be made with confidence.
Apologies again for the somewhat ardent response but I am a firm believer in the value that these standards provide and would warn against pulling in a load of indefinite and unquantifiable data into some transparent, robust and trustworthy data.
With best regards, Stuart
Stuart Maxwell
VP of Business Development
Scholarly iQ, LLC
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