White Paper on Electronic Journal Usage Statistics

This paper provides a snapshot of developments in the industry. It identifies issues that concern both publishers and librarians and suggests a context for further discussion between the providers and consumers of electronic journals. Since libraries that host electronic journal content locally face the same challenges in collecting usage statistics as do publishers, the author chose to interview librarians at OhioLINK, Los Alamos National Labs, and the Florida Center for Library Automation to determine how they provide such data to their consortia members. Publishers and providers were then interviewed to compare their approaches to collecting and presenting the data with those of the libraries. Finally, comments from both groups were solicited to identify their concerns and to establish a base for understanding and interpreting the data. Summaries of selected interviews are provided in Appendix A. To provide a frame of reference for this study, current initiatives by other organizations on developing data collection policies were reviewed. In addition to guidelines published by the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC), which were based on the JSTOR initiative, there is substantial work being done in this country by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS), and abroad by the European Commission. The ICOLC guidelines may be found in Appendix B; information on related industry initiatives appears in Appendix C. While some of the studies focus on defining data elements and collecting statistics, others examine data in light of factors used to assess performance, such as the percentage of user population being served. Among th...