A 20-minute presentation to the 2015 Code4Lib Northeast event about a project to build a reporting service for authors. This service reports on downloads of author papers from the MIT Open Access Articles Collection.

1. Visualizing Open Access
building a scalable infrastructure to
showcase the reach of MIT research

2. Background

3. Background
March 18, 2009 - Open Access Policy adopted
“...The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by
the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty.”

4. Background
March 18, 2009 - Open Access Policy adopted
“...The policy is to take effect immediately; it will be reviewed after five years by
the Faculty Policy Committee, with a report presented to the Faculty.”
2009 – 2013
MIT Libraries assemble a collection within Dspace@MIT for Open Access
Articles.
~15,000 articles, ~ 1 million downloads

5. Background
~15,000 articles, ~ 1 million downloads, but…
Author-level information?
Department-level information?

6. Background
March 18, 2009 - Open Access Policy adopted
“[P]olicy … will be reviewed after five years…”
August 2013 - Project begins
“Implement author-level, article-level, and aggregated article download usage
statistics for articles in the Open Access Articles Collection in DSpace@MIT to
incentivize deposits and provide useful assessment information for the MIT
Faculty Open Access Policy.”

7. Prior Work

8. Prior Work
MyDASH provided solid model…
• Map
• Timeline
• Summary table

9. Prior Work
MyDASH provided solid model…
• Map
• Timeline
• Summary table
… but couldn’t be directly implemented.
• Repository versus One Collection
• Multiple department affiliations

10. Project Goals
• Make available download statistics at three levels:
author, article, and aggregate
• Incentivize deposits to collection
• Provide useful information for policy evaluation
• Evaluate new technologies within the Libraries (i.e.
MongoDB)

11. Pipeline

12. Two-part project
Data processing pipeline
https://github.com/MITLibraries/oastats-backend
Visualization interface
https://github.com/MITLibraries/oastats-ui

13. Pipeline
https://github.com/MITLibraries/oastats-backend
• Apache logs
• Python
• DSpace
• GeoIP
• SOLR

14. Pipeline
Start from Apache server logs
● Filter the qualifying downloads
● Look up the downloaded paper
● Augment with additional information
● Store in MongoDB
● Use SOLR to build summary collection
UI queries summary collection

15. Pipeline

16. Pipeline challenges

17. Pipeline challenges - authors
Author identities
● Field-specific naming conventions
o “Abelson, Hal”
o “Abelson, H”
o “Hal Abelson”
● Common names

18. Pipeline challenges - authors

19. [
{
"mitid": “3.1415926537",
"name": "Cohen-Tanugi, David"
},
{
"mitid": “2.7182818",
"name": "Dave, Shreya H."
},
{
"mitid": “6.02x10^23",
"name": "Grossman, Jeffrey C."
},
{
"mitid": “1123581322",
"name": "Lienhard, John H."
},
{
"mitid": “1234567890",
"name": "McGovern, Ronan Killian"
}
]
Pipeline challenges - authors

20. Pipeline challenges - departments
Department names
● Inconsistent program / department affiliations
o “Media Laboratory”
o “Center for Bits and Atoms”
● Spelling Variations
o “MIT Department of Physics”
o “Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Physics”
o “Dept. of Physics”
o “Physics”

21. Pipeline challenges - departments
Standardized department names
Whitelist of recognized names

22. {
"_id" : ObjectId("5449127895b0c25083f29352"),
"status" : "200",
"handle" : "http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/52491",
"title" : "A basal ganglia-forebrain circuit in the songbird biases motor output to avoid vocal errors",
"country" : "USA",
"authors" : [
{
"mitid" : "3.1415926537",
"name" : "Fee, Michale S."
},
{
"mitid" : "6.02x10^23",
"name" : "Andalman, Aaron S."
}
],
"request" : "/openaccess-disseminate/1721.1/52491",
"referer" : "http://www.google.com/search?q=head+mounted+microphone+zebra+finch&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.m
ozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a",
"user_agent" : "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8",
"time" : ISODate("2010-08-10T17:14:03Z"),
"ip_address" : "128.218.64.242",
"dlcs" : [
{
"display" : "McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT",
"canonical" : "McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT"
},
{
"display" : "Brain and Cognitive Sciences",
"canonical" : "Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

23. {
"_id" : "Overall",
"countries" : [
{
"country" : "862",
"downloads" : 35
} …
],
"dates" : [
{
"date" : "2014-01-07",
"downloads" : 3
} …
],
"downloads" : 10000,
"size" : 101,
"type" : "overall"
}

24. Web interface

25. Web interface
https://github.com/MITLibraries/oastats-ui
● Mongo-backed
● PHP
● DataTables
● D3.js
● DataMaps

26. Web interface

27. Web interface

28. Web interface

29. Web interface

30. Web interface

31. Email to authors

32. Email to authors
Dear {name},
Thank you for sharing your scholarly articles through the open repository DSpace@MIT <https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/49433/>, in association with the MIT Faculty Open
Access Policy <https://libraries.mit.edu/oapolicy>.
Our newly implemented OA Stats Service provides data about the use and reach of our open access collection. Since August 2010, 15,184 articles have been downloaded from
227 different countries.
This service also provides information at the author and article level:
Your 3 articles have been downloaded 168 times since they were deposited, from 28 different countries.
You can access more detailed download information about your articles, including per-article and per-country downloads at <https://oastats.mit.edu>.
Initially, we plan to provide this information to all authors via email in the Fall and Spring semesters. As we seek to improve the service, we'll consider expanding options to
interact with it and the underlying data.
We are anxious to hear your feedback on how this service can be most useful to you, so please send your suggestions to oastats@mit.edu.
--From the MIT Libraries

33. Email to authors

34. Email to authors

35. Faculty reception
Excitement
● “Thank you for the update, this is a fantastic tool!!”
● “Thanks so much for doing this - it's really cool and awesome!”
Why not more?
● “Hi, I like your feedback. But I am puzzled that only one of my articles is in
your database.”
● Department heads using this as leverage to encourage further
contributions

36. Project goals revisited
• Make available download statistics at three levels:
author, article, and aggregate
• Incentivize deposits to collection
• Provide useful information for policy evaluation
• Evaluate new technologies within the Libraries (i.e.
MongoDB)

37. Future work
● Automate the pipeline
● Run pipeline more frequently
● Ditch Mongo for something relational
● Talk to faculty about making more detailed information
public
● Add functionality to UI (additional format exports, move
to SPA)
● Improve cataloging in DSpace@MIT with lookup
services

38. Thanks!
Matt Bernhardt
mjbernha@mit.edu
@morphosis7
https://github.com/MITLibraries/oastats-backend
https://github.com/MITLibraries/oastats-ui
http://oastats.mit.edu