Matomo: A privacy-respecting statistics tool for Janeway

[mattiker]

We would very much welcome the hosting of a Matomo instance for Janeway. Third-party funding bodies such as the German Research Foundation (DFG) require data protection-compliant processes, so Google Analytics isn't an option. However, to demonstrate the growing role of Diamond OA journals and justify infrastructure costs, it would be compelling to provide privacy respecting use statistics (e.g. access from within the organization or the geographical region). On Discord in 2022, there were already some votes in favor of implementing Matomo in Janeway. This tool offers very good analysis options, including more specific location related ones (current JW reports are limited to country level). See Matomo demo site for a preview

If enough journals or institutions are interested in the tool, it could be implemented in Janeway. Therefore we invite the Janeway community to provide feedback for this proposal. We can of course also talk about sharing the costs when the time comes.

[ajrbyers]

I should add that the OLH itself is interested in this as we don't like relying on the likes of Google Analytics. We would be interested to hear if others are interested in this as a service so we can determine if its something we should direct effort towards.

[christine-guenther]

Much appreciated! One reasoning behind this is that we want to get away from hosting journals only if there is a TUDarmstadt researcher on the editorial board - they might move to a new job somewhere else etc. Thomas Stäcker (our Director) wants to make it more like an "acquisition decision": is this an important journal that gets used by our researchers? Then we'll pay for it - though we certainly don't want to track individuals! Ironically, for TUjournals the number of corresponding authors from TU Da is small, but the effort to run them is on TUDa shoulders. It shows that it is not just an internal niche publication.
But we foresee having to justify costs for expanding our DOA infrastructure (against folks heavily relying on the big commercial publishers and their JIFs)

Not sure how to get more members in the user group engaged in this decision - we will probably pitch it a couple more times in the general user group.

[ajrbyers]

Thanks for putting this forward. The team are going to discuss this in our next planning call and will report back.