1. Hazards of price-per-use comparison in e-journal management Jason S. Price, Ph.D. Claremont Colleges’ Libraries Los Angeles, California Are they any use?

2. General hazards -- Broad Strokes 1.Defining use narrowly 2.Vagaries of user behavior 3.Different dissemination styles in teaching 4.Granularity of usage reports * Ejournal package-centric approach from an academic institutions’ perspective

3. G1. A narrow definition of use COUNTER JR 1: Full text article requests Additional use-related measures: A-Z list click throughs/Web log files Times cited at your Inst. in recent papers –ACS Livewire 8:2 Impact Factor # of papers published by local researchers by journal Faculty/Researcher Surveys Print Use? Page Rank? (Bollen & Van de Sompel 2006)

4. G2. Vagaries of search/use habits Users may check for full-text before judging relevance from abstracts (or even titles!)or even titles Google Accelerator

5. G3. Dissemination style in teaching Prof. A downloads 1 pdf, makes copies for students ↓ under-counts 1 use for many Prof. B sends link to publisher PDF to her 40 students ↑ over-counts many uses of 1 article Prof. C posts pdf on Electronic Reserve site ↓ under-counts 1 use for many

6. G4. Usage Report Granularity Title level use statistics Can’t separate frontfile use from backfile use whether purchased or freely available

7. Specific Hazards – Cost per use 1.Determining cost 2.Comparison to ILL cost 3.Comparison across Publishers 4.Ignoring ‘by-title’ data 5.Lack of benchmarks

8. COUNTER briefing Counting Online Use of NeTworked Electronic Resources -A standard & code of practice that enables comparison of usage statistics from different vendors Components: Terminology & Definitions Layout & Format of journal & database reports) Processing of user input Delivery frequency & availability period Testing & Regular audits www.projectcounter.orgwww.projectcounter.org tinyurl.com/nxqvvtinyurl.com/nxqvv COMPLIANT

9. Overall cost per use =1 year’s cost / 1 year’s requests e.g. $58,600 publisher E-access fee 35,700 article views $1.64 Cost per use * $420,000 mandatory cost of subs (to agent) for a subset of these same titles $420K + $ 58.6K = $478,600 / 35,700 = $13.40 S1. Determining Cost ?

10. Overall cost per view by Subs Type

11. S2. Comparison with ILL Package CPV = $13.40 What does this tell us? Is it High? Low? Better than ILL?

12. S3. Cross-package comparison So Pkg 1 is a better value than Pkg 3? CPV It might not be…

13. Variation in use by format Davis and Price, 2006 JASIST

14. html to pdf Ratios vary widely for these packages How many pdfs in Pkg 1 are duplicates of html views?

15. Live Link

16. S3. Package value revisited pdf requests only tell a different story! CPP CPU vs.

17. Response: COUNTER filter A unique article filter provides new metric: number of successful unique article requests in a session Vendor% Reduction (Group 2) Publisher A25.14% Publisher B25.50% Publisher C21.40% Publisher D35.65% Publisher E47.36% Need to be applied to Specific institutions/ interface configurations

18. Reality Check Should we expect cost per use to be equivalent among packages? Quality Scope Business Model –For Profit vs Cost Recovery Exposure in Google Scholar ASSUMPTIONS

19. S4. Ignoring by-title data

20. Cutting off the long tail…

21. Before Collaboration  After Collaboration 

22. Consortium S5. Lack of Benchmarks

23. Consortium S5. Lack of Benchmarks

24. Consortium S5. Lack of Benchmarks

25. Consortium S5. Lack of Benchmarks

26. Consortial benchmarking

27. Recommendations 1.Ensure you have the right cost 2.Be wary of cross-publisher comparison –Consider both overall and pdf use –Should it be the same? 3.For single package evaluation: –Look at patterns at title level –Benchmark vs Consortium or Peers –(Support efforts to ‘outsource’ CPU analysis to consortia staff)

28. Support from COUNTER oIndication of subs type (Subs vs Lease) oSeparation of backfile data Unique article filter to mitigate interface & linking effects By title data Single Password consortium access to aggregate and by-institution statistics Much more…