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; however, there are major privacy implications to using Google Analytics. As of 2021, YUL is making a locally-hosted hosted instance of Matomo available for YDJ editors in order to provide more granular analytics while respecting user privacy.

You should know that analytics packages such as Google Analytics and Matomo only provide statistics as of their implementation. In other words, it is impossible to add Google Analytics to your journal today in order to get web traffic stats for the previous year.

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 use Google Analytics. YDJ created a dedicated Google account to track analytics for each of these journals. Please contact Tomasz to find out if Google Analytics has been implemented for your journal or to have it implemented.

Editors should note that there are major privacy implications to using Google Analytics. You may wish to note the use of Google Analytics in your journal’s privacy statement. Please contact Tomasz if you wish to discuss alternatives to Google Analytics.

Matomo

YUL is implementing a locally-hosted instance of Matomo as an alternative to Google Analytics. As of August, 2021 we are still in the process of installing the latest version of the software, developing the expertise to manage it, and determining best practice for use in YDJ journals. If you are interested in implementing Matomo for your journal, please contact Tomasz.