US to bring together institutional repository usage statistics on a national scale for the first time.

Jisc and LYRASIS, a global non-profit membership association providing technology and content solutions for libraries, museums, and archives, are joining forces to introduce Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS) in the United States.

IRUS-US is the first service to bring together standards-based usage statistics of participating repositories in the US. The service will enable US repositories to provide and gather comparable usage data, while also giving them the opportunity to benchmark usage at an international level.

Liam Earney, Jisc's executive director of digital resources, says:

"We are excited to work with LYRASIS in delivering IRUS-US. Data aggregated through IRUS-US will help research managers demonstrate the value of open access content by recording and reporting online resource usage in a consistent and credible way."

The US is the fourth country to join the growing online repository community, alongside Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The University of Amsterdam and online library and publication platform OAPEN and CORE which hosts the world's largest collection of open access research papers, are also using the service.

Celeste Feather, LYRASIS senior director of content and scholarly communication Initiatives, says

"We are excited to facilitate the growth of the IRUS-US community. Adoption of IRUS-US will enable US universities and research organizations to measure the impact of their institutional repository and compare the activity to reports from national and international peers using industry-recognized COUNTER-conformant statistics."

One of the first US institutions to adopt the service is the University of Michigan, using the IRUS stats to access standards-compliant data and to report on and visualise repository usage.

Jim Ottaviani, service manager for Deep Blue, the University of Michigan's institutional repository service, comments:

"Making our work available to all who need it is a foundation of our mission, and participating in international efforts helps ensure we can make that happen. We're pleased to work with IRUS because, by doing so, we get a reliable benchmark of both our reach and of how our efforts complement those of ourpeers around the world."

Universities and research organisations can signup to IRUS-US from 1 July 2020 by contacting Hannah Rosen, LYRASIS scholarly communication specialist and digitization program coordinator.