Tracking Open Access Usage

Open Access usage is a complex topic. In this webinar, we’ll look at what metrics can be collected, and whether we should look at the data globally, or at an institutional level, possibly to evaluate affiliated institutions’ APC payments or open access agreements.
We will discuss the topic both from a publisher and a library perspective, with panelists sharing their experiences and opinion on the feasibility of conducting a usage-based analysis of open access articles to determine their value to institutions and libraries.

If you didn’t get the chance to participate in the webinar, you can download the slides here.

Summary

In last week’s webinar, we welcomed an experienced panel of guest speakers to help us uncover how to track open-access usage.

Laura Wong from Jisc, Andrew Pitts from PSI & IPREGISTRY, and Stuart Maxwell from Scholarly iQ joined us and showed how their platforms work while our Head of Publisher Relations, Romy Beard, moderated the session and kept track of the audience’s questions.

First in line, we had Andrew Pitts from PSI & IPREGISTRY, a global repository for the IP addresses used by libraries, platforms, and publishers to authenticate access to content. Andrew shared how IPREGISTRY uses the fully auditable data within theIPregistry.org to generate open-access usage metrics for publishers, universities, funders, and authors.

Our next speaker was Stuart Maxwell from Scholarly IQ, an independent leader in usage reporting since 2002. He addressed COUNTER standards (including Release 5.1) for Open Access and challenges and opportunities for item-level reporting of open-access content.

Our last speaker was Laura Wong from Jisc, a not-for-profit organization providing digital services and solutions to UK higher education, further education, skills, and research. She presented how Jisc is collecting and analyzing usage data from licensed content (JUSP) and repository content (IRUS) on behalf of consortia members.

After the three introductory presentations, the discussion moved into use cases and clean data. Laura Wong told us about Jisc’s experience with institutions looking at data and metrics, as well as the importance of looking at the data globally instead of focusing solely on specific institutions, as this provides a broader understanding. This lead the discussion into; how do we track this successfully?

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Andrew Pitts pointed out that to avoid tracking issues, we should focus on IP addresses and ensure that they are accurate, making the data more auditable. He also noted the big elephant in the room when tracking open-access data: patrons’ usage of rogue sites, as a significant factor concerning the loss of usage tracking.

Stewart Maxwell joined the discussion and shared how ScholarlyIQ plans to continue building data models with both publisher and demo data. It’ll have both citation and metric counts, so this data can be tied together within one data table to provide users with a seamless report.

The lively discussion continues, and this is only a brief summary.
If you haven’t already, feel free to watch and share the full recording to hear the engaging discussion between our speakers and get all the key insights and perspectives on tracking open-access usage.

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