From: "Guédon Jean-Claude" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 02:34:33 +0000

I just talked to Jason Priem yesterday in New York and I would indeed encourage everyone to lookk at the URL that Sally Krash mentions below. It is simply awesome. It rests on a very simple distinction: do not pay attention to what researchers want (in the aggregate), pay attention to what they actually read. Then Big Deals really look stupid from a librarian's perspective.

Jean-Claude Guédon


On 2019-11-19 12:29 p.m., LIBLICENSE wrote:
From: Sally Krash <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 13:49:18 +0000

Hi Ted,

 

Are you familiar with the new tool that Open Research just launched - still in beta?

 

https://journals.unpaywall.org/

 

You can view the demo to see how their tool differs from yours.

 

In our last system-wide Elsevier renewal - the University of Massachusetts has 5 campuses - we used an analysis model based on what the University of Montreal used about 6 years ago to evaluate big deal packages. In our data analysis, we looked at usage and citation data, combined with data from a survey conducted of all faculty (36% response rate on our campus) to determine which journals they needed for teaching and research. So, out data analysis contained both quantitative and qualitative data.

 

Best,

 

Sally Krash

Associate Dean for Content and Discovery

UMass Amherst Libraries

413-545-6865

[log in to unmask]

https://works.bepress.com/sallykrash/

 


 

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