Does this hold for other free services? For example, most library patrons believe it is free to check out a physical book. Should we also begin charging a dollar per check out at the public library? And why stop at a dollar. If it is worth knowing the demand at $1, why not find out what it is at $5 and $10? I get it that download counts provide limited information. But charging for something we have intentionally invested in making free doesn’t seem like the right approach.
Curtis
Curtis Brundy
Iowa State University
P: 515-294-7563
From: JJE Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:06:33 -0400
It is, of course, a milestone that Knowledge Unlatched (KU) reached over one million downloads in 2018, but does anyone know what these figures mean? A download is a crude metric, comparable to the page view in consumer Web advertising. No one in the advertising industry uses anything so primitive any more. It is perplexing to me that the scholarly community would use measures less sophisticated than those used to try to sell us a Pez dispenser or a trip to Las Vegas.
It is an article of faith in the OA community that the high price of scholarly materials (invoke Elsevier's 40% margins here) deny access to researchers and the general public. This must be at least partly true, as we read all the time about monographs priced at $40 or $90 and even, last week, a college textbook priced at $1,000. But going from a high price to no price at all--OA is free to the end-user, after all--is an odd bit of methodology. When we measure downloads instead of sales, we move from the demand economy to the supply economy. This is apples and oranges.
The question I have is how many downloads KU or any other OA book service would have if there were a charge of $1 per download, thus marrying the demand and supply-side economies. Would the number of downloads drop to 900,000? 500,000? 15? We won't know until we try.
It will be argued that even $1 is too much for some people. This is true. But where does the assumption that everyone is penniless come from? Surely there are some people who have downloaded books from KU who have a Netflix subscription, drive a Honda, and stopped off at Starbucks in the past month? A price of $1 download would help us find out what needs KU and other OA book publishers are serving and begin the hard task of measuring the real value these services provide.
Joe Esposito
On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:30 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: [log in to unmask]
org
Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2018 19:48:24 -0400
Knowledge Unlatched titles reach over 1 million downloads in 2018
More than 250% increase in use compared to 2017
Berlin, 28.08.2018. Knowledge Unlatched (KU) announces a new record
for usage of its Open Access (OA) books. Over 950 titles from the
Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) have been accessed more than 1
million times by users worldwide in the past 8 months of this year
alone. The increase in usage compared to 2017 is significant: On
aggregate, KU content has seen 570,000 full-text downloads on the
OAPEN platform and a further 490,000 chapter downloads on the JSTOR
platform.
"We are pleased that scientists around the world are using the content
of our approximately 100 publishing partners to such an extent." says
Tom Mosterd, Discovery & Account Manager at KU. "It is exciting to see
that libraries are committed to ensuring that OA books are made
accessible to a global audience, thereby playing a crucial role in
reaching this key milestone.’’
Financed by libraries worldwide, nearly 1,000 titles have already been
made available through Knowledge Unlatched, and several hundred titles
are added every year.
About Knowledge Unlatched: Knowledge Unlatched (KU) offers every
reader worldwide free access to scientific content. The online
platform provides libraries worldwide with a central point of contact
to support Open Access models of leading publishers and new Open
Access initiatives.
Contact:
Philipp Hess, Publicity & Communications, Knowledge Unlatched
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