Re: A reply to Elsevier [Re: Usage Statistics for Web Editions

["James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@stanford.edu>]

Hi David,

Perhaps I did misunderstand the original complaint. If, as you note in
your response, the company is in fact already generating all the reports
for all ranges, and is simply witholding them, then it does make sense to
complain about not conforming to the spirit of the original COUNTER
proposal, or to the more exact wording of the 2nd draft.  I obviously did
not make that connection from the original message, and so I would
apologize for misunderstanding. The reason I misunderstood is that the
writer complained

    The argument that usage statistics is "costly to provide" doesn't
    make much sense once the basic infrastructure is in place, especially
    if they already have to provide statistics for a subset of fully
    licensed titles so that the account is already set up.

That reads to me like a subset of logs, those for licensed titles, were
already being processed but others were not.

It boils down to whether or not ELS loads all logs into some central data
processing system and then extracts reports from it, or if ELS first
processes accounts to determine which logs to load.  If I were writing it,
I'd do it the first way, but it's possible to see reasons for the second
approach (3rd party software which goes from logs directly to report, for
example).  Given the size of ELS perhaps I should just assume they do it
the first way, but I have a knee-jerk reaction when I see people complain
about the obvious low cost of running a system. :)

Jim
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James A. Robinson                       jim.robinson@stanford.edu
Stanford University HighWire Press      http://highwire.stanford.edu/
650-723-7294 (W) 650-725-9335 (F)