Re: A COUNTER concern.

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

You are perfectly right Thomas. And we do work with the few known mirror
archives that have all of the articles we publish. But an important and
perhaps so far under-illuminated aspect of open access is that any server,
anywhere, is free to take the articles and distribute them further, the
whole corpus or just a single article, and anything in between, without
having to tell the publisher. The practical feasibility of working with
all those unknown and untraceable providers is non-existent to the best of
my knowledge.

Best,

Jan Velterop


On 28 May 2004, at 20:30, Thomas Krichel wrote:

> Jan Velterop writes
>
> > 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).
> If your articles are available on multiple servers, you should work 
> with the providers of such servers to unite the usage data. The RePEc 
> digital library does this with its LogEc service. It combines the logs  
> from various RePEc user services. See http://logec.hhs.se.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Thomas Krichel                      mailto:krichel@openlib.org
>                                  http://openlib.org/home/krichel
>                              RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel