5 Web and readership statistics

This chapter covers two types of statistics:

• Article and editorial statistics, which are collected and accessed through OJS itself, and
• Web analytics, which are collected by third-party applications.

Article and editorial stats

OJS offers robust statistical reporting tools for article views and downloads and for editorial activity as of version 3.2.

You can learn about OJS’ built-in statistics reports in the Learning OJS 3 guide.

Web analytics

There are several alternatives available for getting web traffic stats (also called analytics) for your OJS site. YDJ creates all instances of OJS with an open-source analytics package called AWStats. Some journals were also configured with Google Analytics Universal Analytics; however, there were major privacy implications to using Google and Universal Analytics was shut down in 2024. In 2023, YDJ switched to a locally-hosted hosted instance of Matomo to provide more granular analytics while respecting user privacy; as of the end of 2023, all YDJ journals are configured with Matomo.

You should know that analytics packages such as Google Analytics and Matomo only provide statistics as of the date of their implementation.

Matomo

YUL has implemented a locally-hosted instance of Matomo for all journals as an alternative to Google Analytics. As for the end of 2023, Matomo has been configured for all YDJ publications. YDJ does not currently have standardized reporting procedures: if you would like to request stats from Matomo, please contact the Digital Publishing Librarian.

AWStats

All instances of OJS created by YDJ include AWStats.

You can access AWStats for your journal by adding the text /awstats/awstats.pl after “yorku.ca” in your journal’s domain. Table 1 shows how to access AWStats using YDJ’s OJS sandbox as an example.

Google Analytics

Some YDJ journals created in OJS prior to 2019 used Google Analytics Universal Analytics, which was shut down in 2024. YDJ created a dedicated Google account to track analytics for each of these journals. If you wish to attempt to retrieve any remaining data in Google Analytics, please contact the Digital Publishing Librarian.