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Scholarly Communication - Infrastructure
Status: Completed

Aim
One of the advantages of making a publication available on the Internet (with Open Access) is that you can keep track of how often it has been viewed and downloaded. In order to make user statistics comparable, arrangements have been agreed in SURFshare’s “SURE” project (Statistics on the Usage of REpositories) regarding statistics on the number of views and downloads of publications in repositories. A central database has also been developed that collects, analyses, and presents log data.
Almost all the Dutch universities implemented the agreed arrangements and the tool in the course of 2011.

Results
The NARCIS research portal presents statistics for a large number of publications. Every university researcher in the Netherlands can see how often his/her publication has been downloaded. This clarifies the impact and use of Open Access publications produced at Dutch universities.

User statistics are interesting for both authors and institutions. An author can see the number of views and downloads for all his/her Open Access publications. An institution can see from the view and download statistics how its own repository and those of other institutions are being used.

To make this possible, the SURE2 project has achieved the following (partial) results:

1. Local repositories have been connected to the statistical infrastructure developed during the SURE pilot project. All the participating institutions have installed the SURE module that makes it possible to harvest statistics.
2. The repository managers make the statistics for their repositories available according to internationally agreed specifications. To do this, they utilise the SURE module from the pilot project.
3. The Central Log aggregator acquires (“harvests”) the statistics from the repositories.
4. Based on the harvested data, the Central Log aggregator draws up normalised statistics for each participating repository. These statistics can be reused by the institution as it sees fit.
5. A dashboard, Insight Repositories, has been developed with which to view the statistics for each participating repository.
6. Widgets have been developed for use in the Insight Repositories dashboard. These present information about the total number of users, use over time, geographical distribution, the most popular publication, and (relative) views and downloads.
7. An extra function, Insight Publications, has been added to the NARCIS website to display statistics per article on the publication pages with the metadata.
8. An extra function, Insight Authors, has been added to the NARCIS website to display statistics per author on the author pages (using the Digital Author Identifier, DAI).
9. “Embeddable” HTML code is supplied with the dashboard widgets so that the most up-to-date statistics can be displayed on separate webpages.

The project results for the first SURE project can be viewed on the SURFfoundation wiki.

Demonstration
See also the presentation about the SURE2 project by Maurice Vanderfeesten. The presentation shows what the intended results look like, for example the dashboards for Insight Repositories, Insight Publications, and Insight Authors. 

The SURE2 project is part of the SURFshare programme that is working towards an updated knowledge infrastructure.

Institution:	Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Technische Universiteit Delft, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Tilburg University, Universiteit Leiden, Universiteit Maastricht, Universiteit Twente, Universiteit Utrecht, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Wageningen Universiteit
Project manager:	Dr. H.H. Ellermann
Budget:	€ 50,000.00
Subsidy:	€ 25,000.00
Start date:	Wednesday 1 June 2011
End Date:	Monday 10 January 2011