Events, Educational Programs
aap/PSP/COUNTER
The Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers Electronic Information Committee (EIC) & Counting Online Usage of Networked
Electronic Resources (COUNTER) Presents…
Usage Statistics and Publishers: Implementation and New Insights
Monday September 20th, 2010
10:30am-3:30pm
CQ Press Offices
2300 N Street, NW
Washington, DC
Who should attend? Anyone involved in the publishing, marketing and sales of online journals, books and databases who is interested in quantitative measures of product performance, impact and status
COUNTER usage reports are already well established among librarians as essential tools for assessing the value of the journals and other online products in their collections. But there is another, growing area of activity that is gaining in importance as the body of reliable, COUNTER-compliant usage data increases and as usage statistics feature more prominently in assessments of the value, status an impact of online publications. This area may be termed ‘usage bibliometrics’ and COUNTER is working actively with other organizations on the development of new, usage-based measures of value, status and impact. ISI’s journal Impact Factors, based on citation data, have become generally accepted as a measure of the quality of scholarly journals, and are widely used by publishers, authors, funding agencies and librarians. There are, nevertheless, misgivings about an over-reliance on Impact Factor alone in this respect. The availability of the majority of significant scholarly journals online, combined with the availability of a growing body of reliable COUNTER-compliant online usage statistics, raises the possibility of a parallel usage-based measure of journal performance becoming a viable additional metric.
This workshop will look at the usage-based metric tools already developed by COUNTER for measuring the performance of online publications as well as the potential of emerging usage-based tools to provide insights into research performance of individuals and institutions. Important questions the Workshop will address include: What should we measure? Technology continues its relentless march and the way the usage of online publications is recorded and reported must take this into account; what was a meaningful metric 5 years ago may no longer be meaningful in the emerging technology environment. How much can we expect publishers to invest in recording and reporting usage? We live in an age where our capacity to generate data is almost infinite, while our capacity to absorb and interpret data is limited by time and resources. Generating, collecting, processing and storing data is a costly process and all stakeholder groups involved must be convinced that the exercise is one in which the benefits justify the costs. What performance metrics can be derived from usage statistics?
Many librarians already routinely calculate ‘cost-per-download’ and ‘cost-per-FTE’ and these have become helpful barometers of the value, or otherwise, of individual titles or collections of titles. There are other, usage-based metrics that are also being considered. Journal Usage Factor is one. ISI’s journal Impact Factors, based on citation data, have become generally accepted as a valid measure of the quality of scholarly journals, and are widely used by publishers, authors, funding agencies and librarians as measures of journal quality. There are, nevertheless, misgivings about an over-reliance on Impact Factor alone in this respect.
The Workshop will encourage discussion and debate, based around the following presentations:
Whence COUNTER?
Peter Shepherd, Director, COUNTER
Journal Usage Factor: a usage-based alternative to Impact Factor
Richard Gedye, OUP, Chair of the Journal Usage Factor Steering Group
Usage statistics in context: related standards and tools
Oliver Pesch, EBSCO and Co-Chair of NISO’s I2 (Institutional Identifiers) Working Group and SUSHI Standing Committee
COUNTER: a publisher perspective
Melissa Blaney, Lead Web Analyst, Web Strategy & Innovation, American Chemical Society
COUNTER: a librarian perspective
Kathy Perry/Tansy Matthews, VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia
Whither COUNTER?
Peter Shepherd/Richard Gedye - this presentation would focus on the future directions that COUNTER could take and would invite an open discussion involving all participants
Online Registration Form
Registration Form (Print & Fax)