CrossRef Distributed Usage Logging Pilot presented at Fall SSP Seminar on September 16, 2015 at Washington DC

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Presented By
Date
CrossRef Distributed Usage Logging Pilot
SSP Fall Seminar
Victoria Rao
September 16, 2015

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https://library.uwinnipeg.ca/scholarly-communication/index.html

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http://www.scopus.com/record/pubmetrics.url?eid=2-s2.0-33947385649
Cites, Mentions, Tweets, Likes, Reads, Blogs,
Comments …. events

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Distributed Usage Reality
Researchers are increasingly using “alternative”
(non-publisher) platforms to store, access and
share the literature
• Institutional and subject repositories
• Aggregator platforms (EBSCOhost, IngentaConnect)
• Researcher-oriented social-networking sites (e.g.
Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley)
• Reading environments and tools (e.g. ReadCube,
Utopia Documents)
• …

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CrossRef DET (DOI Event Tracking)
• CrossRef DET: common “event” repository; scaling existing Lagotto
infrastructure for all DOI-based events – in scope of the pilot
• Focus on capturing all kinds of user-content interactions using
standardized message envelope (easily customizable for various types of
events) – data collection
• Data propagation and distribution
DET Pilot White Paper

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CrossRef DET and Distributed Usage Logging
Focus on:
DET – capturing any and all types of user-content interactions
DUL – focusing on COUNTER usage events occurring outside of the
publisher platforms and processing such events via publisher’s
COUNTER-compliant usage reporting streams
Organized as:
• 2 technical groups (DET and DUL)
• Executing 2 pilots to demonstrate technical feasibility, identify
supported use cases and standardize event exchange
DUL Technical Group
Beverly Jamison (American Psychological Association)
Chris Shillum (Elsevier)
Christian Kohl (de Gruyter)
David Sommer (COUNTER)
Genevieve Early (Taylor and Francis)
Harald Wirsching (Springer)
John Carroll (Nature Publishing Group)
Maciej Rymar (Mendeley)
Nicko Goncharoff (Digital Science)
Oliver Pesch (Ebsco/COUNTER)
Paul Needham (Cranfield University/ISUS)
Sarah Price (University of Birmingham)
Victoria Rao (Elsevier)
Wiley and MyScienceWork joined initiative as well

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Elsevier Sharing and Hosting Policies
• Elsevier supports the STM Article Sharing Principles and we want to work
in partnership with organizations aggregating and making available
versions of articles published by researchers with Elsevier. Hosting policy
complements our sharing policy which outlines how authors can share
their research, and agreements with subscribing institutions about how
licensed material can be shared.
• We believe that we all have a shared responsibility to work together to
ensure researchers can share research quickly, easily, and responsibly.
This requires active partnering to ensure the coherence and integrity of the
scientific record, to promote responsible sharing in a way that respects the
needs of all stakeholders, and to enable impact and usage
measurement in a distributed environment.
• Hosting platforms should develop and share COUNTER compliant
usage statistics so that researchers and publishers have a full picture of
how articles are shared and used.
https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/sharing
https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/hosting

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COUNTER Codes of Practice
http://www.projectcounter.org/about.html
• COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) is
an international initiative serving librarians, publishers and intermediaries
by setting standards that facilitate the recording and reporting of online
usage statistics in a consistent, credible and compatible way.
http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi/
• NISO is the National Information Standards Organization of the United
States. COUNTER has worked with NISO on SUSHI (Standardized Usage
Harvesting Initiative) to develop a protocol to facilitate the automated
harvesting and consolidation of usage statistics from different vendors. This
protocol is now available and may be found on the NISO/SUSHI website
above.
• Hosting platform must collect and report COUNTER-compliant usage
statistics to the appropriate publishers
• Entitlements gap: hosting platform may not be aware of the end-user
entitlements at the publisher’s side

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Distributed Usage Gap – the problem
It has been noted that usage on non-platforms is often
legitimate, i.e. from researchers who have access to the
content via institutional subscription agreements, however
because the usage does not occur on the publishers’ own
platforms, it cannot be captured in the COUNTER-
compliant usage reports sent to subscribing customers,
meaning that:
• Publishers are not able to demonstrate to their customers the
true value of their subscription holdings and are not able to
provide authors will a full picture of usage of their articles.
• Institutions are not able to make a full and accurate assessment
of the usage of the content they subscribe to when making
purchasing decisions.

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DUL – Capturing Distributed Usage
1. Researchers read
articles on site of
choice
2. Sites log usage via DUL
API Including DOI, IP
address, Institutional ID
3. CrossRef orchestrates
usage event logging to
publisher’s usage
logging API
4. Publishers include third-
party site usage in
COUNTER reports sent to
customers
Publisher A
Publisher C
Publisher BCrossRef
COUNTER
Institutional
Repository
Social
Networking
Site
Reading
Environment
Institution
Publishers register
usage logging API URLs
with CrossRef
COUNTER certifies sites and
issues logging token

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CrossRef DUL – who is involved
Role of COUNTER
• Define semantics of usage
logging messages
• Validate and issue
credentials to participants in
the scheme
• Define Code of Practice and
oversee compliance auditing
process
Role of CrossRef
• Define syntax of usage
logging messages
• Build and operate technical
infrastructure
• Define technical API specs
• Provide training and
documentation on technical
integration
Role of Platform
Vendors
• Integrate with DULAPI
• Leverage CrossRef
framework to discover DUL
API endpoints
• Send usage events via API
to publishers
• Adhere to COUNTER
defined Code of Practice
Role of Publishers
• Implement DULAPI
• Register DUL API endpoint
with CrossRef
• Receive usage events from
hosting/sharing Platforms
• Incorporate DUL into
existing COUNTER-
compliant usage reporting
stream

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CrossRef Distributed Usage Logging Group Aims
• Define a way for DOIs to advertise endpoints to which event data
may be submitted, including a mechanism to specify the payload
schemas that the endpoint accepts.
• Pilot the end-to-end transmission of COUNTER-usage events from
platforms providing direct access to full text to publishers
responsible for that full text, using the above mechanism.
• Work out the "rules of the game" for the COUNTER use cases,
including message semantics, responsibility for anti-gaming
mechanism, etc.

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DUL Pilot scope and use case
Use case: single usage event message in CrossRef DOI envelope format
is submitted by 3rd party/social platforms to publisher (owner of the DOI)
distributed usage logging API (private event exchange).
Scope:
one 2 one
private event
exchange
between hosting
platforms and
publishers
CrossRef DET facilitates
DUL API endpoint
discovery given resource
DOI

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What happens after usage event submission?
DUL Usage
Event via API
Authenticate
User
Log Usage
Event
COUNTER
Usage Report
User info, ex. IP address
Publisher’s COUNTER-compliant usage reporting stream
DOI, format, account
Usage events to publisher
Customers
Customer specific usage reports
Non-
publisher
Platforms

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Mandatory HTTP request header:
Content-Type: application/vnd.crossref.det-envelope+json; charset=UTF-8;v=1.0.0
POST Payload:
{
"uuid": "", "message-type": "", "source-token": "", "message":
{ "doi": "", "content-type": "", "user-ip": "", "event-time": "", "session-id": "",
"user-agent": ""
}
where:
uuid is a message identifier
source-token is a platform (where the usage occurred) identifier
doi is a DOI of the article (same as [doi] parameter on the URI)
content-type is article format, such as application/pdf, text/html, text/xml, etc
user-ip is end-user IP address
event-time is usage event timestamp in ISO 8601 format
session-id is user session identifier (or equivalent)
user-agent is name of the application used to access article
15
CrossRef DUL Pilot - message format

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CrossRef DUL Pilot – Example API request / response
Example URI:
https://api.elsevier.com/content/usage/doi/10.1016/S0014-5793(01)03313-
0?apiKey=dc55dd54dd2e5b85bb32441101581fa7&httpAccept=text/xml
Mandatory HTTP request header:
Content-Type: application/vnd.crossref.det-envelope+json; charset=UTF-8;v=1.0.0
Example POST Payload:
{
"uuid": "e583eca0-fdf4-45ff-8c8e-2c3ce1196ea7",
"message-type": "counter-download",
"source-token": "Platform_Name",
"message":
{ "doi": "10.1016/S0014-5793(01)03313-0", "content-type": "application/pdf", "user-
ip": "127.1.1.1", "event-time": "20150603", "session-id": "1234", "user-agent":
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0" }
}
Expected successful HTTP response:
Status Code: 201 Created

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CrossRef DUL Pilot – sample distributed usage report
Journal Publisher Platform Article DOI … Format Jun-15
Cardiovascular
Pathology Elsevier Platform_VictoriaTest
10.1016/j.carpath.2012.0
2.012 PDF 2
Cardiovascular
Pathology Elsevier Platform_VictoriaTest
10.1016/j.carpath.2012.0
5.004 PDF 2
Cardiovascular
Pathology Elsevier Platform_VictoriaTest
10.1016/j.carpath.2014.0
2.001 PDF 2
Cardiovascular
Pathology Elsevier Platform_VictoriaTest
10.1016/j.carpath.2014.0
2.002 PDF 2
Cardiovascular
Pathology Elsevier Platform_VictoriaTest
10.1016/j.carpath.2014.0
2.004 PDF 2
Cardiovascular
Pathology Elsevier Platform_VictoriaTest
10.1016/j.carpath.2014.0
3.008 PDF 2

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COUNTER Proposal: Distributed usage events
Activities in a (individual user) private library (similar to a private storage
library)
• Add to library (e.g. from hard drive or directly from a publisher website)
• Open/Read the article
• Annotate the article
Activities of a user in a closed (by invitation only) group:
• Add to library (‘consume’ for later use from another user in the group)
• Open/Read the article (‘consume’ for direct use from another user in the
group)
• Annotate the article
• Share the article with other users in the group (‘upload’ the article)
Activities of a user on a public website (e.g. in a public group, or a public
profile on a publicly (indexable) website):
• Download the article from a public website
• Open/read the article on a public website
• Annotate the article
• Upload an article onto a public website
COUNTER proposal v2, prepared by Sonja Lendi

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COUNTER proposal: Example Usage Reports
Journal Publisher Platform Journal
DOI
Proprietary
Identifier
Print ISSN Online
ISSN
Reporting
Period
Total
Reporting
Period
HTML
Reporting
Period
PDF
Jan-2015 Feb-
2015
Total 254,465 117,137 137,277 122,130 132,335
Academic Pediatrics Elsevier ScienceDirect ACAP 1876-2859 1876-2867 121 100 21 83 38
Academic Radiology Elsevier ScienceDirect XACRA 1076-6332 140 68 72 89 51
Academic Radiology Elsevier Mendeley XACRA 1076-6332 12 0 12 5 7
Academic Radiology Elsevier Readcube XACRA 1076-6332 9 0 9 6 3
Academic Radiology Elsevier Institutional Repository A XACRA 1076-6332 3 0 3 1 2
Accident Analysis & Prevention Elsevier ScienceDirect AAP 0001-4575 106 68 38 38 68
Accident and Emergency Nursing Elsevier ScienceDirect 0 0965-2302 19 14 5 11 8
Accounting Forum Elsevier ScienceDirect ACCFOR 0155-9982 64 37 27 8 56
Accounting Forum Elsevier Mendeley ACCFOR 0155-9982 89 0 89 45 44
Accounting, Organizations and Society Elsevier ScienceDirect AOS 0361-3682 108 19 89 14 94
Accounting, Organizations and Society Elsevier Mendeley AOS 0361-3682 130 0 130 11 119
Accounting, Organizations and Society Elsevier Readcube AOS 0361-3682 112 0 112 50 62
Accounting, Organizations and Society Elsevier Institutional Repository A AOS 0361-3682 5 0 5 4 1
Accounting, Organizations and Society Elsevier Institutional Repository B AOS 0361-3682 8 0 8 4 4
Journal Publisher Platform Journal
DOI
Proprietary
Identifier
Print ISSN Online
ISSN
Reporting
Period
Total
Reporting
Period
HTML
Reporting
Period
PDF
Jan-2015 Feb-
2015
Total 254,465 117,137 137,277 122,130 132,335
Academic Pediatrics Elsevier ScienceDirect ACAP 1876-2859 1876-2867 121 100 21 83 38
Academic Radiology Elsevier ScienceDirect XACRA 1076-6332 140 68 72 89 51
Academic Radiology Elsevier Non-publisher platforms XACRA 1076-6332 12 0 12 5 7
Accident Analysis & Prevention Elsevier ScienceDirect AAP 0001-4575 106 68 38 38 68
Accident and Emergency Nursing Elsevier ScienceDirect 0 0965-2302 19 14 5 11 8
Accounting Forum Elsevier ScienceDirect ACCFOR 0155-9982 64 37 27 8 56
Accounting Forum Elsevier Non-publisher platforms ACCFOR 0155-9982 89 0 89 45 44
Accounting, Organizations and Society Elsevier ScienceDirect AOS 0361-3682 108 19 89 14 94
Accounting, Organizations and Society Elsevier Non-publisher platforms AOS 0361-3682 130 0 130 11 119
Method 1.1 (1 line per sharing platform)
Method 1.2 (1 line for all sharing platforms)
COUNTER proposal v2, prepared by Sonja Lendi

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DUL Technical Group – progress so far
• December 12, 2014 – Distributed Usage Logging (DUL) technical group is formed
• January 15, 2015 – first meeting of the DUL technical group sets aims, forms two
subgroups with focus on technical feasibility and policy aspects.
• February 27, 2015 – DUL technical group meeting; two subgroups concluded their
activities resulting in proposal of DOI event envelope with DUL message specification and
DUL use cases. The DOI envelope specification and use cases are added to CrossRef
DET white paper.
• March 14, 2015 – pilot implementation of the Elsevier DUL API is available along with
technical documentation guide.
• April 30, 2015 – Mendeley implemented proof of concept using Elsevier DUL API and
provided feedback.
• May 15, 2015 – DUL technical group meeting; group proposed refinement of the required
elements in DUL message to ensure COUNTER compliance when processing usage
events .
• June 5, 2015 – next pilot iteration of the Elsevier DUL API is available, incorporating
feedback from May 15 meeting to include additional parameters in the DUL message.
• July 2, 2015 – DUL technical group meeting; introduction of 2 new members joining DUL
initiative MyScienceWork and Wiley. Sample DUL usage report via Elsevier DUL API is
presented and discussed. Further refinements are proposed in attempt to standardize
DUL message format and usage reporting.

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Next steps
• Identify and document new use cases as more publishers and 3rd
party platforms are joining the initiative.
• Define usage event types (ex. “raw-download”).
• Discuss usage reporting needs and corresponding formats while
taking into account user privacy considerations and COUNTER
compliance.
• Collaborate with COUNTER on use cases and report formats
• Propose and pilot usage event message authentication and anti-
gaming mechanisms.
• Pilot CrossRef DOI pingback/linkback mechanism for DUL endpoint
discovery (when supported by CrossRef DOI infrastructure) and
demonstrate end-to-end functionality.

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Thank you!
Email: victoria.rao@elsevier.com
?