eJournal interface can influence usage statistics

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

Of possible interest to readers of liblicense...

eJournal interface can influence usage statistics: implications for
libraries, publishers, and Project COUNTER.

Philip M. Davis and Jason Price

Abstract

A publisher's interface design can have a measurable effect on electronic
journal usage statistics. A study of journal usage from six
COUNTER-compliant publishers at thirty-two research institutions in the
United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden indicates that the ratio of
HTML to PDF views is not consistent across publishers, even after
controlling for differences in publisher content.  Some publishers require
users to view the HTML version of an article before the PDF version, thus
artificially inflating their number of fulltext downloads.  A further
source of bias is the fact that CrossRef and other similar linking
mechanisms can be used to direct all external links to the fulltext rather
than the abstract of each article.  
These results suggest that usage reports from COUNTER-compliant publishers
are not directly comparable in their current form.  One solution may be to
modify publisher numbers with 'adjustment factors' deemed to be
representative of the benefit or disadvantage due to its interface.  
Standardization of some protocols may alleviate these differences and
allow more accurate cross-publisher comparisons to be made.

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