openlibhums / openlibhums/janeway

Consider COUNTER list of robots when capturing article level metrics

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#4,597 1 comment 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@mauromsl is already working on this.

Since Jan 23, 2025.

new feature Priority urgent Size M
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Python
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9d 1h
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Description

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
While Janeway does capture metrics adhering to the COUNTER method, we use a different list for filtering out accesses made by bots.

Describe the solution you'd like
When deciding to capture an article level access record, we should check the request headers against counters robots text list:

https://github.com/atmire/COUNTER-Robots/

I'd recommend that any records that pass our filtering but is on the list of COUNTER robot should still be recorded, but flagged as not counter compliant. With this approach we can measure its impact.

Describe alternatives you've considered
The alternative is to discard metrics that are not compliant with COUNTER robots, but this approach would lead to a skew in the metrics for existing installations, without a mechanism to understand its impact

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