Bot Shields: Activate! Ensuring Reliable Repository Download Statistics

Readership statistics are critical measures of impact for authors and administrators alike. However, distinguishing between computers and human readers of repository content presents a significant technical challenge to the open access community. While some bots are out there are crawling your content to get it indexed in places like Google and other search engines, others are trying to mimic humans and inflate your download counts. At bepress, we’ve been battling to filter out the nefarious invaders for more than a decade to keep these open access infestation problems away from Digital Commons repositories. In this webinar, we share our ongoing and multi-faceted approach to identifying and filtering activity from robot sources for Digital Commons repositories.