Digital Commons, part of Elsevier, consistently checks algorithms of how downloads are tracked. Added security has consistently been implemented invisible to human users, and it will not impact helpful bots like search engines and harvesters, as it is designed to only tackle bad bot activity. It will also help protect against attacks by bot networks. A dashboard is provided with administrators/authors to track their use on. Digital Commons Dashboard, and we don't do anything with that from The TMC Library. Also, it only tracks as far as institution and country names, not the individual level.
Using McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics’ Dissertation & Thesis as an example, this school has 32,663, and 3917 in the last 365 days (data from June 26th, 2024). From its dashboard, in the last 90 days, the papers from Dissertation & Thesis have been viewed and downloaded by 70 institutions, and feel free to use the Export button to see the complete list in an Excel file, as shown below:
The same thing is for countries, it has been accessed and downloaded by 64 countries in the last 90 days, and feel free to use the Export button to download the complete list in an Excel file.
