Usage Statistics indicators for research products, like publications, datasets,etc., are an important complement to other (traditional and alternative) bibliometric indicators to provide a comprehensive and recent view of the impact of such resources but also about their authors, institutions and the platforms themselves. They are taking into account different levels of information: the usage of data sources, the usage of individual items in the context of their resource type and the usage of individual web resources or files.
Usage Statistics Indicators are built by the OpenAIRE's UsageCounts Service. The service collects usage data and consolidated usage statistics reports respectively, from its distributed network of data providers (repositories, e-journals, CRIS) by utilizing open standards and protocols and delivers reliable, consolidated and comparable usage metrics like counts of item downloads and metadata views conformant to COUNTER Code of Practice.
