RE: A COUNTER concern.

[Jan Velterop <velterop@biomedcentral.com>]

It is possible, of course, perhaps probable, that COUNTER provides proof
of the LACK of utility of the products purchased or leased. That, I
suspect, is a fear that at least some publishers may have, making it in
their interest to sustain confusion.

COUNTER is also not very satisfactory for open access journals. The best
it can provide is the MINIMUM number of downloads an article has had. This
is because open access articles are available from a multitude of servers
and repositories, and not only from the publisher's own site (which is the
only one COUNTER counts, presumably). That said, it's most likely that
even this minimum proves to be better than for otherwise similar articles
that are not open access. For an idea of the most-viewed articles in
BioMed Central's open access journals, look here:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/mostviewed/. There is a 'most-viewed in the
last 30 days' and an 'all-time most-viewed' list.

Jan Velterop
www.biomedcentral.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hamaker, Chuck [mailto:cahamake@email.uncc.edu]
> Sent: 24 May 2004 22:53
> To: Liblicense-L
> Subject: A COUNTER concern.
> 
> As electronic access becomes the dominant model for accessing information
> in many libraries we MUST be able to show administrators, faculty,
> legislatures, funding agencies, PROOF of the utility of the products we
> purchase or lease. IT is not intuitive that e-resources must be 
> purchased.  If we can't demonstrate utility, then administrators who 
> think libraries are deep pits of money being siphoned off from the 
> institution, may feel justified in reducing library support. The common 
> cause of COUNTER is critical for publishers and vendors and libraries. 
> It brings order out of what is almost chaos right now, and it helps 
> define to external concerns what it is we are about. If it works 
> ultimately we might be able to point to a single statistic showing 
> overall activity in e-resources.

[SNIP]