What kinds of usage statistics does PubMed Central provide to participating journals?
Each publisher has password-controlled access to a web site that has usage reports for that publisher’s journal(s). The reports, updated daily and aggregated by month, include counts of available articles, total access by type of page (table of contents, abstract, full-text HTML, PDF, etc.) unique IP addresses, and most frequently retrieved or cited articles. Line graphs of each measure supplement the reports. Any report may be downloaded as a CSV file, for analysis with a spreadsheet package such as Microsoft Excel, or as an XML file. On request, PMC will also provide a publisher with a CSV file each month with usage for the month at the article level. PMC’s usage reports generally contain all information called for in the COUNTER specification, except that PMC does not report use by specific institutions. NLM’s privacy policy prevents the reporting of use at an individual or organizational level.
