Dear Ted
Thank you for an interesting post about the tool you are developing. I would like to chip in on one point your raise about the value of download statistics for cross-publisher comparisons.
The article you mention, "Do Download counts reliably measure journal usage: Trusting the fox to count your hens", highlighted an important issue with Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. This is sometimes called the ‘platform effect’, whereby platforms that take a user directly to the HTML full text of an article, were likely to report more successful requests that platforms which take a user first to an article abstract. This is because if the user viewed the HTML of an article and then downloaded a PDF of the same article, it counted as two ‘Successful Full-Text Article Requests’.
Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice, effective from 1 January this year, deals with this issue through a new metric; ‘Unique_Items’.
If for example, a user in the same session accesses the full text HTML of an article
and also downloads the PDF of the same article, this counts as one Unique_Item_Request. This metric ensures cross-publisher comparisons however the platform is configured.
Kind regards
Lorraine Estelle
Project Director
COUNTER
From: Ted Bergstrom <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2019 13:10:17 -0800
Negotiations between Elsevier and the University of California system over open access and pricing seem to have reached a stalemate, and the UC no longer has the Elsevier Big Deal. Currently, no UC campus subscribes to any Elsevier journals. If the UC chooses not to reenter the Big Deal, the UC campus libraries will probably find it worthwhile to subscribe to some Elsevier journals. Which ones should they choose?
A UCSB student, Zhiyao Ma, and I are developing a little tool that we hope will help UC librarians in making cost-effective selections of Elsevier journals for subscription. The UC has download statistics for each Elsevier journal at each of its campuses. Elsevier posts a la carte subscription prices for each of its journals. Our tool allows one to select a cost per download threshold and obtain a list of journals that meet this criterion, along with their total cost. It also allows for separate thresholds to be used for different disciplines. You can check out the current version at https://yaoma.shinyapps.io/Elsevier-Project/
Since this project is still under way, we would be interested in any suggestions from librarians about how to make this tool more broadly useful. Extending this tool to make comparisons among journals from multiple publishers is an obvious step. However, we are dubious about the value of download statistics for cross-publisher comparisons. There is evidence that download counts substantially overstate usage, because of repeated downloads of the same article by the same users, and that the amount of double-counting varies systematically by publisher. This is discussed in a couple of papers of which I am a coauthor.
"Looking under the Counter for Overcounted Downloads" (with Kristin Antelman and Richard Uhrig)
and
"Do Download counts reliably measure journal usage: Trusting the fox to count your hens". (with Alex Wood-Doughty and Doug Steigerwald)
Instead of using download data, we could construct a similar calculator using price per recent citation as a measure of cost-effectiveness. We have found that the ratio of downloads to citations differ significantly between disciplines. So it is probably appropriate for cost per citation thresholds to differ among disciplines.
At any rate, we would value suggestions.
Ted Bergstrom