1. What does Elsevier count? Use Measures for Electronic Resources: Theory & Practice ALCTS Program, ALA, Chicago Daviess Menefee Director, Library Relations, Americas Date: June 27, 2005

2. 2 My Agenda for today  Part 1: Some history on usage reporting with ScienceDirect  Part 2: Present some of the business aspects of usage from a publisher’s point of view  Part 3: Look at a couple of interesting results on usage and its reporting from our internal studies

3. 3 Not too long ago….  ScienceDirect usage reports were:  Word Documents  Derived by processing logfiles on a PC, over a single weekend  Provided only the barest of data  Began with 6 insisting customers  Delivered via email by the assigned Account Manager  Never detailed what was not used.

4. 4 Did we know what we were doing?  We thought so.  Some internal concern over the potential impact of usage reports on subscriptions  No standard or benchmarks to follow  Navigating in the dark  Had high hopes to advance the “science” of usage reporting and analysis. But we didn’t know what that was.  Usage reporting grew organically from the demands of the market as well as the business.

5. 5 And then we made some mistakes.  Usage reporting and transactional downloads were not fully reconcilable. Two different systems in play.  Not including 0 usage in the reports caused a degree of unreliability in the reports.  Trying to define sessions in a session-less state was not very productive.

6. 6 But then we did some good things.  Published a white paper indicating that we were reducing the number of downloads based on user behavior. (Our sales staff were not pleased.)  Invested heavily in designing and implementing a state of the art system that could provide reports directly to the customer.  Supported the establishment of Counter.

7. 7 Did we learn anything?  Yes, about customer reporting. We have improved as an industry in defining and delivering them. We have come a long way.  We have created a trusted third party group to monitor and audit the reports.  We continue to study user behavior and try to understand it better.

8. 8 Part 2: Why does Elsevier count usage? Data for business information such as  Trends  Product Performance  Return On Investment Need Data for Informed decisions  Determine Future Directions, ex: Pricing

9. 9 Elsevier Management Reports  Produced Monthly  Summarize Key Performance Indicators  Indicators: Major Areas  Content  System  Customers  Other (Links, trials, Web Editions, etc.)

10. 10 Performance Indicators for SD  Content Indicators  Number of Journals  Number of Abstracts  Number of full-text articles available  System Performance  Number of Page Requests  Total Full-text articles downloaded, PDF/HTML  Total Articles incl. SD On Site  Total Searches

11. 11 Performance Indicators, 2  Customers  Number of Contracts  Number of Registered Accounts  Number of Active Accounts  Estimated number of user sessions  Number of Active Users (cookie based)

12. 12 More on Performance Indicators  “Other areas” measured:  Trial Customers  Guest Usage  Esp. Article downloads (PPV)  Web Editions (limited to customer base statistics)  Promotional Usage  Scirus (no. of searches and indexed pages)  Linking Indicators

13. 13 What is the point?  Company has set target numbers for most areas of the KPI’s.  Change our thinking from traditional publishing to how to grow an electronic journals--books business.  Enables the setting of objectives and priorities.  Publishing units now have usage goals.

14. 14 Product Management Reports  Opportunity for product managers to review and comment on trends or explain why a number is out of proportion.  Examples:  Usage of abstracts decreased during the month but the number of guests users increased.  MathML increased this month over last month and points to a trend of continuing growth.

15. 15 Data is converted to graphs

16. 16 What’s worth counting?  Just about everything that involves end users and content.  Full-text Articles are the norm but Elsevier also continues to monitor browsing behavior especially from guest users (a possible new market).  Important to look at changes and how that effects any usage (training, system changes, etc.)

17. 17 Part 3: Some Internal Studies 1. Referring URL Study  Who is sending us the traffic?  What are the subject areas where users come into the product? 2. Usage on Usage Study  Are these reports really being used?  Who is using them?  What triggers use?

18. 18 Traffic Referrals to SD  Major Sites (95%):  Customers’ OPACs  PubMed  Elsevier Site – Cell Press  Cross Ref  ChemPort  Search Engines (Scirus)

19. 19 Referrals as a Chart

20. 20 SD Entry by Subject Areas

21. 21 Some Analysis on Subject Entry  Life Science end users prefer to come into ScienceDirect from 3 rd party sources, namely the A&I databases  Humanities and Social Scientists prefer the Journal Home Page on ScienceDirect  For some areas there appears no difference: Energy, Chemical Engineering, Mat Sciences and Engineering.

22. 22 2. Usage of Usage Reports  Internal Elsevier Study of use of ScienceDirect usage reports  Who uses usage reports?  Asia/Pacific Librarians lead the list  What triggers use of these reports  Email Alerts  Asia/Pacific has the most alerts set up  63% customers use the reports when they have an alert as opposed to 30% without the alert.

23. 23 Effect of Alerts

24. 24 Popular Usage Reports

25. 25 Number of Reports over time

26. 26 Usage Reports: did we over build?  ScienceDirect data may indicate such.  But the data may be useful some day and probably best to keep it at hand for now.  Are there more functional reports that should be developed, e.g. factor in cost of content for performance measure?

27. 27 To really end this presentation-  We still do not know enough about user behavior and how that affects the numbers.  We do know that the users are disparate and have different usage patterns in their respective subjects.  Open question: what are meaningful numbers and in what context. Answer may be a local solution.  Publishers don’t have all the answers either.

28. Thank You! d.menefee@elsevier.com