About the Journal Usage Statistics Portal
Electronic journals represent a significant and growing part of the academic library's offerings. In 2007, the academic community spent £80 million on e-journal licenses and collectively those purchases have yielded more than 102 million downloads. Increasingly it is important to have reliable information with which to evaluate the impact of the increase in access and availability of online journal content. However it has been difficult, if not impossible, for librarians to obtain meaningful usage data from publishers of electronic journals.
JISC Collections commissioned Evidence Base and Mimas to produce a technical design and prototype for a Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) to assist and support libraries in the analysis of NESLi2 usage statistics and the management of their e-journals collections.
A successful prototype was developed, taking in usage data (COUNTER JR1, JR1A and JR5 reports) from five libraries in respect of three NESLi2 publisher agreements.
The prototype demonstrated that the portal can provide a basic "one-stop shop" where libraries could go to view and download their own usage reports from NESLi2 publishers, a move welcomed by libraries that currently have to go into each publisher's password protected administration sites separately.
In addition the project aggregated publishers' usage statistics with those from gateway or host intermediary sites such as Swetswise or Ingenta, which some libraries use as their main route to e-journal articles helping libraries to get a truer picture of their overall usage statistics.
Another feature important to libraries was the ability to view their use of titles in a current NESLi2 deal separately from use of titles in a backfile or archive collection. This is increasing important as publishers claim cost per download based on usage of current content and backfile content. The demonstrator also made it possible for libraries to compare their usage of different NESLi2 publisher deals, to look at trends over time and to complete their annual SCONUL return in respect of usage of titles from NESLi2 publishers.
The prototype also allowed for consideration of a number of "added value" services that a usage statistics portal could offer:
- Demonstration of how to identify the use of those titles included in usage statistics but not currently available within the deal. This will help particularly in exploring the reasons for nil use of certain titles and will help track journals that change publisher.
- Exploration of how prices could be added to journal titles to allow libraries to compare usage of high and low priced titles, and to calculate the yield value of the deal.
- Addition of subject categories, to help libraries analyse deals by department or faculty, this is especially useful for those who do not have central budgeting.
The prototype also demonstrated that it would be possible to provide JISC Collections and its negotiating agents with regular reports on usage of the NESLi2 deals. This is essential information both for future negotiations, and to illustrate the value of the NESLi2 deals to the JISC community. Libraries are also very interested in being able to benchmark their usage against others. The extent to which such benchmarking can be delivered depends on JISC Collections' negotiations with publishers and libraries, but the portal would be able to offer whatever methods (JISC bands, type of university etc) are agreed.
