Announcing PIRUS 2: a project to develop practical standards for recording and reporting online usage at the individual article level 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 PIRUS 2 is lead by Mimas (The University of Manchester) and Cranfield University; the other primary partners are COUNTER, Oxford University Press and CrossRef ?. Oxford University, Southampton University and other Institutional Repositories will also participate in PIRUS 2, together with publishers, subject repositories and related projects, in UK, EU and USA. Work on PIRUS 2 commenced in October 2009 and the final report will be published in December 2010. For further information on PIRUS 2, please go to the project website at: http://www.cranfieldlibrary.cranfield.ac.uk/pirus2/ (external link) Regards Paul A S Needham ___________________________ Research & Innovation Manager Kings Norton Library Cranfield University Cranfield MK43 0AL The Kings Norton Library has been awarded Charter Mark, the UK Government standard for excellent customer service. This communication is sent in confidence to the named recipient only. If you are not the named recipient, any use, disclosure or copying of this communication is prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately by telephone or email. The opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the corporate views of Cranfield University. Cranfield University accepts no liability for the content of this email or the consequences of any actions taken on the basis of the information provided.