Issue Lab’s digital object identifier (DOI) statistics are supplied by CrossRef, the organization we partner with to issue and maintain DOIs. CrossRef provides click statistics on a monthly basis. Please note that the Statistics we have available are only for DOIs issued by Issue Lab and having the prefix 10.15868/socialsector.
Here’s more about these statistics, cited from CrossRef’s emailed monthly resolution report.
CrossRef has created a system to automatically email publishers statistics on the number of DOI resolutions through the DOI proxy server (https://doi.org/) on a month-by-month basis. These numbers give an indication of the use of your DOIs and the traffic coming to your site from users clicking DOIs. The DOI links are largely from links in other publishers’ journal references to your articles, but they are also from DOI links in secondary databases, links from libraries using DOIs, and even DOIs in used in print versions.
When a researcher clicks on a DOI link for one of your articles, that counts as one DOI resolution. A DOI resolution is when a DOI is “clicked” – for example, clicking on http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature02426 counts as one resolution to Nature. No information is captured about who the user is or where they are coming from. The information on DOI resolutions is captured by the web server logs on https://doi.org/ which is run by CNRI on behalf of the International DOI Foundation. These numbers are not a precise measure of traffic to your site – cached articles, search engine crawlers not following re-direction and traffic that is directed to a locally appropriate copy through a library link resolver would be included in these numbers, but would not result in inbound traffic on your website. Nevertheless, these numbers provide one important measure of the effectiveness of your participation in CrossRef.