To better reflect actual usage of scholarly publications, Érudit is replacing its readership statistics tool and adopting the international COUNTER standard, widely recognized in the scholarly publishing community.
Uses of the web are evolving rapidly, and so, tools used to measure how often scholarly content is being viewed have to evolve in parallel. Over the last few years, scholarly dissemination platforms have witnessed a substantial increase in automated traffic on the Internet, particularly related to artificial intelligence tools.
These automated accesses can often make up a large portion of traffic seen on a platform, while not constituting actual article views by human users. The result is that some traditional web statistics are less representative of actual usage of scholarly publications.
In this context, Érudit has recently updated its readership statistics tool to provide more reliable data to journals, more appropriate for the needs of the scholarly publishing ecosystem.
Greater Data Reliability
In 2025, Érudit deployed Anubis, a solution designed to filter out illegitimate automated accesses to articles disseminated on the platform. This evolution reflects a willingness to improve both the quality and reliability of article viewing data.
In parallel, Érudit is transitioning toward a statistical tool compliant with the COUNTER international standard, widely recognized in the field of scholarly publishing and by academic libraries.
This data will notably be useful to journals in the context of grant applications to the SSHRC and the FRQ. It also serves as a foundation for Érudit’s new formula for partnership support, a new way to distribute revenues to journals from the POA.
Impact on Journals
Already in use by Érudit for libraries which have a partnership or a subscription with us, and as part of our institutional analyses, the COUNTER statistics are now also being made available to journal teams. As such, we are now providing all of our partners shared access to standardized and comparable data.
With this transition, some data, such as traffic source or some browsing details, are no longer provided as part of the statistics made available by Érudit. The new statistics will focus on full-text views of articles in order to better reflect the actual reach of the scholarly publications available on the platform.
Important to note is that the data provided by Érudit only covers views on erudit.org. It does not account for views on other platforms or websites where a journal might also be disseminated.
A Transition Aligned with Research Practices
By adopting the COUNTER standard for journal statistics, Érudit is aligning itself with internationally recognized practices for measuring the usage of scholarly publications.
This transition will allow journals to benefit from data that is more reliable and comparable, while also being more relevant to the current realities of the web and of digital scholarly dissemination.
References
COUNTER Metrics. (2026). The R5.1 Friendly Guide to COUNTER for Open Access (Canadian Research Knowledge Network & Consortium Couperin, Trans.). https://www.countermetrics.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/OA-guide-2026-EN.pdf
COUNTER Metrics. (2026). The R5.1 Friendly Guide Introducing COUNTER Metrics (Canadian Research Knowledge Network & Consortium Couperin, Trans.). https://www.countermetrics.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Metrics-guide-2026-EN.pdf