Our Principles

Very few efforts have been made towards achieving a comprehensive and transparent mechanism to collect and aggregate usage metrics. Most platforms are limited to collecting their own usage, while many do not even comprehend the complexity of the matter. The HIRMEOS project poses a ground breaking approach that enables metrics collection and aggregation from third party platforms, which is currently a manual job for many scholarly publishers that lack the funds to find a technical solution to the problem.

While many argue that third-party metrics should not be collected until platforms achieve a uniform collection and reporting mechanism, HIRMEOS partners acknowledge the need for authors, publishers, and authors, to have access to data – and that a unique collection mechanism must not be imposed upon the community. For this reason, we have designed a simple standard that allows easy cross-platform analysis through transparent tagging of data to its definition.

We strive to provide the community with open tools that allow easy data collection and distribution, maintaining at all times a high level of transparency of the process used, and making sure that users consuming such data are aware of its origin and meaning.

All our data is, therefore, tagged using a URL of the form domain + platform + type + revision (e.g. metrics.operas-eu.org/obp-html/sessions/v1) that links to a user-friendly definition of the metric in question.