Re: On metrics

[Phil Davis <pmd8@cornell.edu>]

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