[beering]

After reading your comment, I was inclined to agree with you about the statistics. After reading their FAQ, I was convinced to side with them.

Their point is that the stats are garbage-level useless. And I can imagine people bragging elsewhere that their paper received X,000 hits when in reality it's all spam or bots. It's not arxiv's responsibility to monitor that, but it wouldn't feel good to facilitate that kind of disinformation or invite hit inflation. Especially as scientists, we want to either publish good data or no data, not data that we know to be garbage.

[pepon]

As a scientist, give me the data and I will know what to do with it. AFAIK in the http://biorxiv.org/ they provide some statistics and it does not represent a problem.

[rsfern]

As a fellow scientist, I'm much more concerned with how others will interpret these access data. I'm not excited about the prospect of yet another unreliable signal for e.g. hiring committees to latch onto, as they often do with journal impact factors and such.

It might be nice if ArXiv would perhaps provide the data to researchers on request. Just curious -- what kinds of questions would you use this data to answer?

[pepon]

I want the data for the same reasons that any content producer in the Internet wants it. Bloggers, youtubers, any company...everyone. Despite the noise this data might contain, it seems it's useful for everyone except for scientists...to whom I am surprised to hear that it's better not to give the data, in case they misinterpret it. Very risky statement and precedent.

[rsfern]

I didn't mean to imply that the data wouldn't be useful, I was more asking to see if you had any specific questions in mind that this data could shed some light on. Relating download rates to citation is the first thing that comes to mind for me, though honestly I'd be much more interested in analyzing the full citation graph for my field, which generally doesn't post papers to the ArXiv.

It's not that I am personally concerned with misinterpreting the data. I just think there could be some downsides to releasing the data without limiting access in some way. For one, I think there are already issues with the citation metrics are used and interpreted, for example in tenure evaluations. I don't think it would be a step in the right direction if this data were used towards the same end...