Name:
COUNTER Foundation Class 12: Usage in the time of the pandemic
Description:
COUNTER Foundation Class 12: Usage in the time of the pandemic
Thumbnail URL:
https://cadmoremediastorage.blob.core.windows.net/f6d2e5b2-28b2-4970-8de7-540d808b864e/videoscrubberimages/Scrubber_1.jpg?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=849T%2BcFx4871d%2BJl16iEsHYm5h9lImSQ%2F6VQbI39Xcw%3D&st=2024-12-03T17%3A22%3A13Z&se=2024-12-03T21%3A27%3A13Z&sp=r
Duration:
T00H05M16S
Embed URL:
https://stream.cadmore.media/player/f6d2e5b2-28b2-4970-8de7-540d808b864e
Content URL:
https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/f6d2e5b2-28b2-4970-8de7-540d808b864e/COUNTER Foundation Class 12_ Usage in the time of the pandem.mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=Jb83GKfaXI8uWacB%2B46xsz%2B%2FpPEJ9JLX1R6kG%2BUnxio%3D&st=2024-12-03T17%3A22%3A13Z&se=2024-12-03T19%3A27%3A13Z&sp=r
Upload Date:
2022-02-04T00:00:00.0000000
Transcript:
Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
Welcome to this COUNTER Foundation Class in this class, we're looking at how counter reports have been affected by the COVID 19 pandemic. As standard publishers and vendors who provide COUNTER reports remove usage from robots and crawlers, as well as usage outside of your institution, this means you can be sure that your counter reports only show usage by people belonging to your institution.
To tie usage to a specific institution, publishers and vendors make use of authentication. One option is IP address authentication, where a user is recognized as belonging to your institution because they are coming from within your IP range. Another is shibboleth or open Athens, both of which make use of the SAML open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between an identity provider.
That would be and a service provider. That would be a vendor or publisher. IP recognition is simple and often preferred, and though EZproxy can play a role in IP authenticated off-campus access shibboleth remains a better solution for that need. Only usage which can explicitly be tied to your institution through authentication, will appear in your counter reports. In the next few slides, we will discuss how user and publisher behaviors have changed during COVID 19 and why this has affected counter reports.
First, let's look at user behavior. As we all know, many people around the world have shifted from working on campus to working from home. While we would like to think all of these users will know how to log into their library portal and gain access to subscribed resources through that route, in many cases, researchers and students find the content they want to read through web based services like PubMed or Google scholar, where authentication relies on IP ranges.
There is no mechanism for a publisher or vendor to tie this type of off campus access to your institution. Open access content can be read, but subscription content will not be accessible. In terms of counter reports, the OA usage can't appear as an investigation or request because it's not authenticated, and similarly, the denial can't appear as access denied because we don't know the institution to which the denial belongs.
As well as user behaviors changing, there are many publishers who tried to support the research community by making subscription content free to read for a period of time. This may have been just the content relevant to COVID 19, a wider collection or indeed their entire archive without authentication. There is no mechanism for a publisher or vendor to tie usage to your institution.
This means that when they remove the paywall, all content, whether it is open access or free to read, can be read. But none of that usage will appear in your counter reports as an investigation or request. As you can see, the total usage of a publisher or vendor's content is often very high. Stripping out robot or crawler usage as required by counter leaves a smaller subset of clean usage, which includes everything that could be attributed to any subscribing institution, as well as usage that is outside of institutional authentication, such as off-campus usage.
Within this clean usage is a still smaller batch of usage that may be attributed to a subscribing institution, which can then be further subdivided into a single institution's counter reports. With the increase in off-campus usage and the removal of paywalls, many publishers and vendors have seen that their total usage and clean usage numbers have gone up, while at the same time usage attributable to any subscribing institution has gone down.
So what does this mean for your counter reports? It depends on several factors, including how your institution enables off-campus usage, whether the publisher or vendor removed their paywall, what content became free to read when they did so, and how long the free to read period lasted? Some publishers and vendors have reported being able to recognize only 20% of users as belonging to an institution when they have no paywall in place.
There are several lists of publishers and vendors who have made content free to read shown on this slide, and we recommend that you check these lists if your counter reports are showing lower than expected usage. You could also speak directly to the publisher or vendor or to your sales agent. We understand that the value of electronic resources is often measured using metrics like cost per download and that low unique item requests in your counter release.
Five reports may inflate the cost per download for a particular resource. However, please bear in mind that the publishers who removed their paywalls were responding positively and helpfully to a global public health crisis, and they should not be penalized for doing so. We hope that you have found this Foundation Class useful. Please explore our YouTube channel to find other classes in the series, and please subscribe to our channel to make sure you do not miss any new classes.
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