Usage statistics do count

Make Data Count observes that “Sharing data is time-consuming and researchers need incentives for undertaking the extra work. Metrics for data will provide feedback on data usage, views, and impact that will help encourage researchers to share their data”. At Zenodo, we have been working on the same principles and we have launched Zenodo Usage Statistics, a feature that exposes fine-grained up-to-date usage statistics in an easily accessible manner. Now, users can find the number of views and downloads on every record page, and they can also sort search results by most viewed. These statistics are “versioning aware”; by default we roll-up usage statistics for all versions of a record. However, it is also possible to see detailed usage statistics for the specific version of a record.
We strongly believe in user’s right to privacy, thus we have spent a lot of time to design our system to ensure all tracking is completely anonymized. As well, our usage statistics are tracked according to industry standards such as the COUNTER Code of Practice as well as the Code of Practice for Research Data Usage Metrics and thus allows our users to compare metrics from Zenodo with other compliant repositories.