BitViews and blockchain

BitViews as an open-source blockchain application

Let's start with an analogy. BitViews does to online usage data what bitcoin does to money transfers. Each author's approved manuscript (AM), uniquely identified by its DOI, is given a "views account" and every time the AM is viewed/downloaded by a user, the AM views account is increased by one "view".
What if the user is a malicious bot/crawler or if the user accidentally double-clicked? BitViews uses the COUNTER mechanism to weed out malicious non-human online usage.

Participating repositories constitute the ‘nodes’ of the network; over a fixed time period (t), all nodes send their (encrypted) raw usage data (including the DOI of material accessed, time-stamp, and requesting IP address) to a single, randomly-selected node which collates the activity into a block for time t and applies agreed-upon open source rules (e.g., COUNTER criteria) to filter out non-human activity, double-clicks, and so on. A second randomly-selected node verifies that COUNTER criteria have been applied correctly and if so, the block is added to the chain. The process is then repeated, generating a validated, COUNTER-compliant blockchain of online usage with no need for central clearing-house. BitViews has virtually zero running costs, as all the validating, aggregating, and disseminating of online usage data is machine-operated.
Notice that unlike bitcoin, BitViews is secure without requiring "proof of work" and "mining", and thus its energy consumption is miniscule.