Counting on COUNTER RD : Investigating Standardised Usage Metrics for Data at NCI

Usage metrics are an important tool for measuring the value of research infrastructure investment. COUNTER is a global emerging standard that has been previously used to track the usage of electronic resources such as ebooks and online journal articles. In 2018, the COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data Usage Metrics (COUNTER RD) was released to enable standardised reporting by data repositories. It details specific rules for capturing, processing, recording and sharing data usage and is an established framework for monitoring and providing standardised data use reporting. These types of metrics support benchmarking research infrastructure and tracking impact of research investment for data providers, researchers, repository administrators, and funding agencies. A case study trialling the use of COUNTER RD by the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) was undertaken as part of the 2030 Geophysics Collections Project, co-funded by AuScope, the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). The trial revealed some challenges associated with implementing the COUNTER RD standard, particularly with respect to capturing the complexity of data usage via HPC facilities. Although NCI s network accessible data download service (THREDDS) successfully utilised the COUNTER RD approach, it faced limitations in accurately tracking direct access to datasets stored on the Gadi supercomputer for HPC and data-intensive applications. Critically for the current scientific applications, direct access is a popular and powerful way for researchers to analyse this class of data, yet difficult to capture using existing usage tracking frameworks.