Evaluate effort to migrate from COUNTER 4 to 5

[kpsherva]

After reviewing the COUNTER v5 changes summary and various videos from the COUNTER YouTube channel on the v5 release, and an RDA13 presentation on COUNTER we have the following list of practical changes applying to our implementation in invenio-stats.

Metric types

• There's a new classification of Investigations and Requests, with the latter being a subset of the first... This translates to the following:
  • Views = Investigations - Requests
  • Downloads = Requests
• In practical/display terms, this doesn't change anything for us, since we actually counted Views and Downloads individually, so doing the math to put the original metric types (Investigations and Requests) back together is possible.

The following diagrams are helpful to differentiate more clearly between the metric types:

Investigations	Requests

Additional fields

• Some additional fields where added for tracking, mostly related to bibliographic metadata of the record.
• IF we want to generate reports though we would have to rely on getting some of the additional information from the database (instead of capturing it in the view/download events). Some examples of such fields:
  • Access rights
  • Data/resource type
  • Access method: we already separate this by tracking machine/human access by classifying the User-Agent.
    • The way that COUNTER recommends to do this might not be fully compatible though... They prefer tracking via specific endpoints, API keys, IP addresses, etc.
    • We can adapt to one of these methods (e.g. UI vs API endpoints), but it doesn't look important, since the spec just mentions we need a way to differentiate between regular and text-mining/machine actions.
  • Publisher ID: we can take this from metadata
  • Year of Publication: extracted from metadata publication_date
  • Section type: not always applicable, but extractable from metadata

Reports

• Thankfully, we have not implemented COUNTER reports in any module/instance, so we're not affected by any of the changes.
• If we decide to implement reports though we'll need to take into account the additional fields and how to populate them.