1. IRUS-UK and ORCIDs Paul Needham Cultivating ORCID: Encouraging growth
As the research environment and publication routes develop, we are seeing an increased importance placed on Open Access materials such as those available via institutional repositories. Institutional repositories enable an institution to share their research outputs with a wider audience and gain a clearer understanding of their organisational research profile. Depositing materials into the institutional repository is not the end point in the process though; what happens to the materials once they're available? This is where IRUS-UK can help.
Paul Needham
Cultivating ORCID: Encouraging growth
Etc venue, Maple house, Birmingham
16th June 2017

2. What is IRUS-UK?
A national aggregation service for UK Institutional Repository Usage Statistics:
Collects raw download data from UK IRs for *all item types* within repositories
Processes raw data into COUNTER-compliant statistics
IRUS-UK is a national aggregator of repository usage statistics. Its purpose is to collate and provide institutions with access to reliable, accurate standards-based usage statistics for their institutional repository. This enables them to gain a better understanding of the usage of their institution's research, which they can then share with key internal and external stakeholders.
IRUS-UK collects data on all downloads from the institutional repository, (not just articles), and processes the data into COUNTER-compliant usage statistics.
COUNTER is an organisation that provides a Code of Practice, which enables publishers, vendors and - more recently - repositories to report usage of their electronic resources in a consistent way. So the usage statistics are Consistent, Comparable and Credible.

3. Who is responsible for IRUS-UK?
Funded by Jisc
Team Members:
Jisc– Project & Service Management & Host
Cranfield University - Development
Evidence Base, Birmingham City University – User Engagement & Evaluation
Bringing together key repository services to deliver a connected national infrastructure to support OA
IRUS-UK is funded by Jisc as part of the Repository Shared Services Project, which includes services to support all stages of workflows for UK institutional repositories such as deposit, metadata, discovery, and usage statistics.
The IRUS-UK team is a consortium utilising expertise from the same group supporting JUSP, the Journal Usage Statistics Portal. This includes:
Jisc, who host the service and provide project and service management
Cranfield University, who provide technical development
Evidence Base at Birmingham City University, who support evaluation and user engagement

4. Providing standards-based, reliable repository statistics
How is IRUS-UK used?
Use cases:
Providing standards-based, reliable repository statistics
Reporting to Institutional Managers
Reporting to Researchers
Benchmarking
Supporting Advocacy
Repositories use IRUS-UK in a number of different ways. Last year we took time to speak to a number of our users to understand more about how they use IRUS to support them in their work. From these interviews we produced a series of use cases, each of which includes an overview of what repository managers (and other repository staff) want to be able to do, how IRUS-UK can help, and quotes from repositories using it in this way. One of the key themes from these was the ability to provide standards-based, reliable repository statistics. Knowing that the data goes through a series of filters and is COUNTER-compliant helps repositories know they can rely on the data to use within their institutions. Many use the statistics to report internally such as to institutional management or to researchers. A number use the data for benchmarking purposes, and are able to compare their download statistics with other repositories of a similar size/focus or from institutions they benchmark against in other areas. Some also use the data to support advocacy, for example using the data to feed into newsletters, s, and online statistics pages. These use cases are all available via the IRUS-UK website at the URL on the bottom of the slide. But note: reporting to researchers is problematic.

5. Reporting to researchers - now
IN IRUS-UK you can search for
a specific item
results by author name
Which can be constrained to a single repository
However, it’s a bit hit and miss
Many researchers may share the same name
Others have different names during their career
Or there are different variations of the same name
J. Smith, John Smith, John J. Smith, etc.
The solution to this problem is the ORCID
ORCID = Open Researcher and Contributor IDentifier
a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes one researcher from every other researcher
Immune to name variations or changes

6. Reporting to researchers – a glimpse into the future
IRUS-UK and White Rose have collaborated to create a demonstrator utilising ORCIDs
White Rose has ORCIDs mapped in the RIOXX profile, e.g.
fier=oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:76722
John Salter, at White Rose, created a custom ‘irus-orcid’ set for harvesting via OAI-PMH
us-orcid
That led to some rapid development within IRUS-UK:
A couple of new database tables
a new ingest script to grab and process the RIOXX records containing the ORCIDs
A bit of work in the user interface, and . . .
White Rose is a consortial repository incorporating the Universities of York, Leeds and Sheffield.
RIOXX is a Metadata Application Profile which provides a mechanism to help institutional repositories comply with the RCUK policy on open access.
OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) is a protocol that was developed to enable repositories to expose and share metadata about articles and other items they host.

7. IRUS-UK Index of Authors with ORCIDs
For demonstration purposes we’ve created a simple Author index, showing authors and their associated ORCIDs, along with the number of items and total download figures for each author. Clicking on the hyperlinked ORCID associated with ‘Davies, G J’ would take you through to the ORCID profile page of Professor Davies, who is affiliated with the University of York, showing his biography, publications list, etc. Clicking on his total download figures takes you through to his individual author statistics page.

8. Individual Author Statistics
Usage statistics for G. J. Davies as identified by his ORCID. Notice the four variations of his name in the first four articles listed: ‘Davies, Gideon’, ‘Davies, G J’, ‘Davies Gideon J’ and ‘Davies, Gideon John’. With the ORCID available, you can be certain straightaway that this is the same individual in each case (and, importantly, so can a computer program).
ORCIDs eliminate ambiguity, save time and improve information flows between systems!

9. IRUS-UK & ORCIDs – what next?
HE Institutions
At the moment very few institutional repositories contain ORCIDs
We need more institutions to adopt ORCIDs:
Embed them into their workflows
Incorporate ORCIDs in their repository metadata
Install RIOXX plugins (Eprints) / patches (DSpace)
Expose ORCID metadata via RIOXX in their OAI- PMH interfaces

10. IRUS-UK & ORCIDs – what next?
Once RIOXX metadata is widely available from IRs
and includes ORCIDs
and preferably funder/grant information
Then we can add more functionality to the service
Search by ORCID
Targeted reports for researchers
Targeted reports for funders
Work with the ORCID API to enhance our metadata
And many other things we haven’t even thought of yet!

11. Contacts & Information
Project web site:
Contact IRUS-UK:
@IRUSNEWS
You can find lots more information about IRUS-UK on our website, and if you’d like to contact us you can us. We’re also on Twitter so feel free to follow us and contact us that way if you prefer.