How to use your Dashboard
Last updated
Last updated
For publishers, when you view your Dashboard you can see usage data for your own published works. You can see the usage of the books you have published in terms of views and downloads. You can also view which countries and institutions are using your books, and which subjects are represented in your collections.
Features to explore:
Reset - click “Reset” at the top of the page, or “Reset filters” to the right of the filters selection.
Search by author name (currently displayed as last name, first name) - learn more in ).
Track usage over time - from the “Overview” page, see which month has the highest usage numbers when all book titles are selected.
See usage for a specific title - from the “Overview” page, select a book title from the filter and see the total access number.
See usage across geographic regions - from the “Global Reach” page, select a country from the country filter and see on the number of book downloads and the number of chapter downloads from that country. Countries and territories are based on ISO standard 3166.
Google Books, JSTOR, and OAPEN Counter 5 usage data have information about usage by country.
JSTOR usage data has information about usage by institution.
OAPEN Counter 4 and Counter 5 usage data has information about usage by city.
Look for the “Download report” button in the footer of your Dashboard. Click “Download report”, then select the Dashboard pages that you would like to download. Click the "Download" button then wait for the PDF to be prepared and start to download. If the “Download report” button is not present, this option is not enabled for your Dashboard.
If data export is enabled for your Dashboard, the “Download report” button will be present in the footer of your Dashboard. To export data for any visualisation, click the “kebab” icon (three vertical dots) on the top right of the visualisation, then click “Export”.
Unless otherwise noted, OAPEN data includes both Counter 4 data (C4) and Counter 5 data (C5).
By default, filters are set to show all available data on a page.
Click on a filter and select the checkbox at the top to select or unselect all items in that list.
Click “only” to the right of any item to see results for that item only. For most filter menus you may select multiple items from the list.
Use the text field to enter text to search for a particular item.
To reset the filter, click "Reset all filters" at the top right of the dashboard menu bar to select all items again.
Presenting a holistic view of usage information can be difficult, because eBooks can be hosted in multiple repositories and platforms, in different file formats (e.g. PDF, EPUB, MOBI, HTML), and in different levels (e.g. whole book or by chapter). Each repository provides book content to different audiences in different ways.
Caveats:
For publishers with a smaller number of titles, it’s harder to see patterns in the data and to understand why some titles get more downloads than others.
Incomplete data can hamper making accurate comparisons between titles and groups of titles.
But all that said, the Dashboard can help you explore some interesting questions!
Publishers, here are some questions the Dashboard data can help you consider:
In which countries and territories are my publications most and least downloaded?
Does this correspond to the languages in which I’m publishing?
Which subjects are most or least popular in different areas?
How does this change over time?
It’s easy to share information from the Dashboard - you can export data for further exploration in a spreadsheet, and visualisations to share with colleagues.
If sharing is enabled for your Dashboard, click more (three dots icon) > Export (to export in CSV and other formats); and click Download report (at the bottom of the page) to export a PDF report.
Adjust your dashboard view and filters to show what you wish to share; for example, with the filter set to show usage for a single author or title.
Look for the “Share” button at the top right of the Dashboard page and click the down-arrow to its right.
Click “Get report link”.
To create the standard link to the Dashboard WITH filters (e.g. in this example, filtered to just the single author): make sure that the “Link to your current report view” checkbox IS set (will not work if the browser window is in incognito mode).
Otherwise, if you wanted to create the standard link to the Dashboard WITHOUT filters: make sure that the “Link to your current report view” checkbox IS NOT set .
Copy the “Link to share”:
Please note:
A dashboard link will only open the Dashboard if the logged-in Google account has been given access, or if the link is made public.
If you send someone a link to a filtered view, they can remove the filter and see all the unfiltered data.
This method of obtaining links to the Dashboard will not work for any Dashboard that is embedded in a website; you need to start from the direct Dashboard link.
You may view the , powered by usage data from the University of Michigan Press which they have very kindly made publicly available, with no login details required.
As part of using data from the Dashboard, we suggest that you take some time to understand the , including the limitations of comparing different data sources. Learn more about how usage is influenced by a work's language, its subject, its platform, and seasonal differences in a from OAPEN and research paper: “”.
When sharing Dashboard information, we recommend including some explanation to help your recipient interpret it in context. For this, you are welcome to reuse information from the section above, and include links to this documentation.
