From: Heather Piwowar <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2019 05:40:06 -0800

Thanks all for mentioning Unpaywall Journals!  I'm one of the creators (along with Jason Priem), and am happy to answer any questions you have.  We are the cofounders of the nonprofit Our Research, the same company behind Unpaywall (bringing OA to the browser, link resolvers in thousands of libraries, and OA in Scopus, Web of Science, etc).

Unpaywall Journals is a new tool to bring OA information to a data dashboard for librarians, so you can see how OA should influence your serials decisions -- and as Jean-Claude said we base the tool on usage not just numbers of articles, how your perpetual access is relevant if you cancel, how much your institution is paying in APCs, etc.

We want everyone to have access to the tool, so we've set the price at $1,000/year USD per institution, which includes analyzing as many publishers as you want, with as many different settings as you want.  It's easy to set up, you just need a COUNTER file.  We already have many customers on board, and consortiums like OhioLINK are signing up too.

A beta version is available now, including a free demo.  Frankly, it's a little hard to understand at the moment without a walk through, so we are working on making the UI a little clearer and also creating a video.  We'll send those to the list when they are done.  But in the mean time if you want to dive in, here is the demo:  https://journals.unpaywall.org/
and here are the docs:  https://support.unpaywall.org/support/solutions/articles/44001822205-getting-started
(and from a nerdy perspective I'd say the description of our way of determining cost-effectiveness Net Cost Per Paid Use is a great place to dig into the details!)

One of the reasons it is in beta is because we want to keep changing it in response to feedback -- and we'd really love to hear your feedback, here on the list or at [log in to unmask].  What you like, what you don't, how to make it be *useful to you*.

Best, 
Heather

---

Heather Piwowar, cofounder

Our Research: We build tools to make scholarly research more open, connected, and reusable—for everyone.

follow at @researchremix, @our_research, and @unpaywall


On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 9:02 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Ellen Finnie <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2019 15:11:11 +0000

Ted, it’s great to see you continuing your journal cost/effectiveness work – I’ve been looking for updates via your journal pricing site, and am pleased to hear the important work continues.  

 

I think the cost per citation metric is a good one to include, along with potentially cost per page, if that is still calculable and meaningful (I think you had some comparisons of nonprofit pubs v for profit on that measure on your prior site, if I recall correctly?

 

I would also flag what Sally said about the unpaywall tool. We’ve been following the development of that tool closely and with keen interest.     There seems to be considerable overlap in the projects and it could be good to distinguish/coordinate these significant efforts.

 

Thanks very much for your work in this arena –

Ellen

 

____

Ellen Finnie

Co-Interim Associate Director for Collections

Head, Scholarly Communications & Collections Strategy

MIT Libraries

P 617 253 8483

[log in to unmask]

http://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly

 


 

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