IRUS-UK: making scholarly statistics count in UK repositories

IRUS-UK is a new national standards-based statistics aggregation service for institutional repositories in the UK. The service processes raw usage data from repositories, consolidating those data into COUNTER-compliant statistics by following the rules of the COUNTER Code of Practice - the same code adhered to by the majority of scholarly publishers. This will, for the first time, enable UK repositories to provide consistent, comparable and trustworthy usage data, as well as supporting opportunities for benchmarking at a national level. This article provides some context to development, benefits and opportunities offered by the service, an institutional repository perspective and future plans.