Analytical tools for “unbundling big deals”
1. Journal Usage Project: The Journal Usage Project (JUP) was a Canada-wide project that involved 28 Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) member universities. JUP was built on the research of Professor Vincent Larivière of the École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, l’Université de Montréal that examined the impact on libraries of the
consolidation of journal publishing.
JUP analysis was based on three data types from the participating universities: article downloads, citations, faculty survey. Analysis of the datasets gave insight into the journals that were consulted in a university, for instance, the article downloads analysis of Queens’ University showed that “15.22% of all available journals account for 80% of Queen’s downloads, references or mentions1“.
See the CRKN website for details.
2. Journal Value Analytics: See the CRKN website for details
3. Unsub: Unsub was launched in 2019, as one of the new analytics software for “unbundling” big deals. It is a fast rising scholarly data analytics tool, as it has more than 200 already. One of the proofs of the workings of analytic tools like Unsub is the whooping sum that was saved in subscription cost to Elsevier journals by the State University of New York (SUNY) library system. According to the Sciencemag, SUNY Libraries Consortium (SLC) reduced the cost of its Elsevier “big deal” from 9 million dollars annually by “unbundling” and subscribing to smaller package of 2 million dollars. With data-driven analysis from Unsub, SLC was able to save about 7 million dollars in 2020 and at the same time provide access to academic resources that are needed by its academic community.
4. Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources (COUNTER): This is the gold standard for journal downloads statistics (Fernández-Ramos et al., 2020) which is based on Sftar (Successful full-text article request). Journal download statistics form part of the metrics for assessing value of journals in analytics tools such as the JVA and JUP.
5. Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP):
6. 1figr of the 1science:
7. Google Analytics: Some libraries (Jabaily et al., 2016) also use data from Google analytics for tracking traffic from the University libraries URL that download publications.
Foot notes: 1. https://library.queensu.ca/about-us/planning-assessment/journal-usage-project
References
Jabaily, M. J., Rodgers, J. R., & Knowlton, S. A. (2016). Leveraging Use‐by‐Publication‐Age Data in Serials Collection Decisions. Where Do We Go From Here? Charleston Conference Proceedings 2015. Charleston Library Conference. https://doi.org/10.5703/1288284316271
Fernández-Ramos, A., Rodríguez-Bravo, B., Alvite-Díez, M.-L., Santos-De-Paz, L., Morán-Suárez, M.-A., Gallego-Lorenzo, J., & Olea, I. (2020). Evolution of the big deals use in the public universities of the Castile and Leon region, Spain. El Profesional de La Información, 28(6). https://doi.org/10.3145/epi.2019.nov.19