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Hazards of price-per-use comparison

in e-journal management

Jason S. Price, Ph.D.Claremont Colleges’

LibrariesLos Angeles, California

Are they any use?

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General hazards -- Broad Strokes1. Defining use narrowly2. Vagaries of user behavior3. Different dissemination

styles in teaching4. Granularity of usage

reports

* Ejournal package-centric approach from an academic institutions’ perspective

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G1. A narrow definition of useCOUNTER 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)

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G2. Vagaries of search/use habitsUsers may check for full-text

before judging relevance from abstracts (or even titles!)

Google Accelerator

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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

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G4. Usage Report Granularity

Title level use statisticsCan’t separate frontfile use from backfile use

whether purchased or freely available

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Specific Hazards – Cost per use

1. Determining cost2. Comparison to ILL cost3. Comparison across

Publishers4. Ignoring ‘by-title’ data5. Lack of benchmarks

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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 & DefinitionsLayout & Format of journal & database reports)

Processing of user inputDelivery frequency & availability periodTesting & Regular auditswww.projectcounter.org tinyurl.com/nxqvv

COMPLIANT

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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

?

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Overall cost per view by Subs Type

Cost per view by access type

$30.51

$0.81

$13.41

$0

$5

$10

$15

$20

$25

$30

$35

All Titles Subscribed Titles[n=192]

Unsubscribed(Leased) Titles

[n=345]

Access Type

Co

st p

er v

iew

[n=537]

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S2. Comparison with ILL

Package CPV = $13.40

What does this tell us?

• Is it High? Low?

• Better than ILL?

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S3. Cross-package comparison

So Pkg 1 is a better value than Pkg 3?

pkgIDTotal Use SubsCost UnSubsCost Overall PPV1 140048 $1,652,000 $182,000 $13.102 20341 $333,000 $10,000 $16.863 13572 $282,000 $21,000 $22.33

CPV

It might not be…

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Variation in use by format

Davis and Price, 2006 JASIST

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html to pdf Ratios vary widely for these packages

352 5684066

13004

32688

48047

0

10000

20000

30000

40000

50000

1 2 3Package

# o

f vi

ews

html viewspdf downloads

1:1.3 1:23

1:12

How many pdfs in Pkg 1 are duplicates of html views?

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Live Link

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S3. Package value revisited

pdf requests only tell a different story!

pkgID Est. pdf Use SubsCost UnSubsCost Overall PPP1 83469 $1,652,000 $182,000 $21.972 18734 $333,000 $10,000 $18.313 13287 $282,000 $21,000 $22.80

CPP

pkgIDTotal Use SubsCost UnSubsCost Overall PPV1 140048 $1,652,000 $182,000 $13.102 20341 $333,000 $10,000 $16.863 13572 $282,000 $21,000 $22.33

CPU

vs.

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Response: COUNTER filterA unique article filter provides

new metric:number of successful unique article

requests in a session Vendor % Reduction

(Group 2) Publisher

A25.14%

Publisher B

25.50%

Publisher C

21.40%

Publisher D

35.65%

Publisher E

47.36%

Need to be applied to Specific institutions/

interface configurations

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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 ScholarASSUMPTIONS

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S4. Ignoring by-title data

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0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1000

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700

Titles (ordered by use for each institution)

Fu

ll t

ext

arti

cle

view

s

CUC SubColl

LLU SubColl

PEP SubColl

CLU

Selected SCELC Subject Collection use (2003)

Cutting off the long tail…

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SCELC SD STL membersProportion of titles

containing 80% of Use

19.4

19.3

25

16

13.9

15.9

11.4

9.8

34.9

34.6

32.6

36.5

33.0

38.8

32.1

26.4

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

CUC

LLU

PEP

UOP

USD

CLU

MLS

MSM

Mem

ber

Proportion

SubCollSTL

Before Collaboration After Collaboration

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SCELC Package 'W' Overall Price per Use

$0.00

$10.00

$20.00

$30.00

$40.00

$50.00

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Member (Sorted by decreasing spend)

Pri

ce p

er f

ull

text

art

icle

vie

w

Use

dat

a n

ot

aval

iab

le

Consortium

S5. Lack of Benchmarks

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SCELC Package 'W' Overall Price per Use

$0.00

$10.00

$20.00

$30.00

$40.00

$50.00

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Member (Sorted by decreasing spend)

Pri

ce p

er f

ull

text

art

icle

vie

w

Use

dat

a n

ot

aval

iab

le

Consortium

S5. Lack of Benchmarks

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SCELC Package 'W' Overall Price per Use

$0.00

$10.00

$20.00

$30.00

$40.00

$50.00

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Member (Sorted by decreasing spend)

Pri

ce p

er f

ull

text

art

icle

vie

w

Use

dat

a n

ot

aval

iab

le

Consortium

S5. Lack of Benchmarks

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SCELC Package 'W' Overall Price per Use

$0.00

$10.00

$20.00

$30.00

$40.00

$50.00

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Member (Sorted by decreasing spend)

Pri

ce p

er f

ull

text

art

icle

vie

w

Use

dat

a n

ot

aval

iab

le

Consortium

S5. Lack of Benchmarks

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Consortial benchmarking

SCELC Package 'E' Price per Use by Member

$0.00

$5.00

$10.00

$15.00

$20.00

$25.00

$30.00

$35.00

$40.00

$45.00

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Member

Pri

ce p

er f

ull

tex

t ar

ticl

e re

qu

est

20052006

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Recommendations

1. Ensure you have the right cost2. 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)

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Support from COUNTER

o Indication of subs type (Subs vs Lease)

o Separation of backfile dataUnique article filter to mitigate

interface & linking effectsBy title dataSingle Password consortium access to

aggregate and by-institution statisticsMuch more…