OJS 3: Giving non-admins/journals managers permission to view UsageStatistics

believedigital · December 9, 2019, 3:41pm

After a bit of a mission we’ve managed to get Usage Stats working on a new OJS 3 install and so now the site admins and journal managers can view usage statistics.

However, we have a number of library managers etc. who also need to see THEIR OWN usage statistics when logged in to OJS.

I can see that we can create roles, but there doesn’t seem to be a ‘Usage Statistics’ specific role - and obviously we can’t give journal manager perms to these users.

Has anyone achieved anything like this before (I can’t believe we’re the only ones who need this) and if so how (what am I missing!?)

Alternatively, does anyone have any pointers on how we might being creating our own ‘MyOwnUsageStats’ permission that we can then use to build out a new role that these users can be given?

Thanks in advance!

ctgraham · December 9, 2019, 9:40pm

@natewr and I discussed this informally at the Sprint in Barcelona. It dovetails nicely with the current work on the Editorial Reports / Journal Health Reports and specific features there.

The next step would be to expose journal numbers to readers, authors, reviewers, etc… (how long does it take on average for a review in this publication? what is the acceptance rate of papers in this publication?)

Contextualizing these statistics for editors and reviewers would be another facet.

Can you describe more when specific statistics you would expect your users to see, and what roles these views would apply to? It would be nice to get a good specification written up for development.

NateWr · December 10, 2019, 12:47pm

There are a large number of issues for future features related to statistics. You can find the project which links to them here:

A couple of issues that might be of particular interest to you:

github.com/pkp/pkp-lib

[OJS] Track and report on institutional subscriber usage

opened 04:46PM - 27 Jul 17 UTC

closed 10:08AM - 18 Nov 21 UTC

jmacgreg

Hosting

Institutional subscribers need to know their readers' usage patterns for a given… journal in order to make decisions on whether a subscription is worthwhile. This requires tracking IP addresses for article views/downloads, and comparing them against institutional subscription IP addresses. Currently, the metrics table in OJS does not track IP addresses. This would have to be added (with care taken to follow any privacy configurations around IP tracking), and the numbers would then subsequently have to be exposed in aggregate for subscribers. These numbers should obey any COUNTER protocol parameters. Some high level implementation considerations follow: 1) Add a new "ip_address" dimension to the `metrics` table. - For each record in the `metrics` table, track the relevant IP address from the log. - Ensure that if the Usage Stats Plugin's "Respect Data Privacy Option" is enabled, IP addresses are not tracked. 2) Create "COUNTER for Institutional Subscribers" report. - This report should be available to all institutional subscribers. - It should report on all journals on the platform, same as the regular report. - It should display the same numbers in the same format as the regular COUNTER report, ie. aggregate views per month for the given year, and then a total YTD for HTML and PDF galleys 3) Add institutional subscriber usage counts to the "Subscriptions" report available to JMs. - For now, probably only include the YTD total as one additional column in the spreadsheet. - Consider including a full month-by-month count as per the COUNTER report above, if it's helpful.

github.com/pkp/pkp-lib

Add a UI to view institution statistics

opened 03:48PM - 12 Feb 18 UTC

closed 08:51AM - 03 Aug 22 UTC

jmacgreg

Enhancement:1:Minor

Add a page in the editorial backend where editors can view institutional usage s…tatistics. This UI should only be available when institutional statistics are being recorded. **Display Notes** * Display a table in the usage dashboard, with the following columns: Institution (name); Type; # of views * Default order by # of views * Sort by column title * Default to all-time, but allow date parameters to be set * Default display of top 25 institutions **Availability** * Editor Dashboard (for all articles in journal; optionally filter for specific article) * Admin Dashboard (for all articles on platform; optionally filter for specific journal, or article) * Author Dashboard (for all authored articles; optionally filter for specific authored article)

We don’t have any particular timeline set on these issues and it doesn’t look like any work has been done so far. It also doesn’t look like those issues talk specifically about giving library managers access to view usage stats from their own institutions. I would encourage you to add that feature request there.

It will take more than a permission to achieve this, because we don’t yet have any code that compiles and displays statistics on a per-institution basis. So that page and stats would need to be made available as well.

believedigital · December 12, 2019, 12:54pm

Hi Nate,

Thanks for the info - I think the first of those Feature Requests actually works for us, so have subscribed for now

I think I read somewhere that Counter 5 is planned as part of the OJS 3.2 release, and so I guess we’re waiting until sometime after then at the earliest before these will be implemented?

Rob