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Re: On metrics



This report is very interesting, but vague on the details. For instance, I don't quite understand how subscription-based resources (whose access is limited to a closed community) are susceptible to Internet robots, automated-processes, crawlers, and spam-bots (RACS). What resource(s) were they testing and whose usage accounts were they monitoring? If the intention of bepress is to establish a new standard of counting, they have to be a little clearer about how they filter.

Individual publisher platforms employ their own mechanisms when a threshold of article requests per IP address per unit time has been breached. Some systems temporarily block IP addresses; some permanently block suspecting IP addresses waiting for a human being to contact the publisher to appeal the block. Some publisher platforms do absolutely nothing. I've successfully downloaded my own article thousands of times from one reputable publisher without setting off any alarms.

As I've argued before, COUNTER statistics are internally valid and can be a good guide to compare articles from the same publisher. They fail to be externally valid for comparing titles across publisher platforms [1]. Download statistics (unlike citations) are non-transparent -- you cannot track down and verify whether the statistical reports you are receiving in your library are truthful representations of what actually transpired. Any economy that is based on non-transparency, blind trust, and few (if any) consequences for unethical behavior is wide open to abuse. When cancellation decisions ride solely on measures of article downloads, librarians should approach these figures with a healthy degree of caution.

--Phil Davis

Philip M. Davis
PhD Student
Department of Communication
336 Kennedy Hall
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
email: pmd8@cornell.edu
https://confluence.cornell.edu/display/~pmd8/resume


[1] Davis, P. M., & Price, J. S. (2006). eJournal interface can influence usage statistics: implications for libraries, publishers, and Project COUNTER. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(9), 1243-1248. http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.IR/0602060


Joseph J. Esposito wrote:

Members of this list may be interested in a recent announcement by
Berkeley Electronic Press, which can be found here:

http://www.bepress.com/download_counts.html