Measuring Usage in an Open Access World | Katina Magazine

"This year, we at Portland Press (publishing on behalf of the Biochemical Society) will convert our hybrid journals to Subscribe to Open (S2O). Going forward, if we receive sufficient renewal commitment from our library funder base, the contents of each annual volume will be published open access (OA). If successful, this radical shift in business model will remove paywalls for all of our content.

While we don’t know what effect this transition will have on usage of journal content, we believe S2O should fundamentally change how we report on, and how institutions interpret, usage statistics.

The first phase of our transition to open began in 2020 and relied heavily on read and publish (R&P) agreements, an uncapped version of the model created collectively in 2019 by independent societies working within a newly formed Society Publishers’ Coalition. The focus of measurement and determiner of success of these agreements has been the number of articles immediately published OA by authors at participating institutions. To some extent, the uptake of article publishing charges (APCs) had already caused a shift away from evaluating deals on read access alone to also including publication output. As OA is becoming more widespread, we believe another change is underway, with global usage becoming an important consideration for librarians managing OA agreements (as evidenced by the focus on global usage in COUNTER Release 5.1).

The shift in the way that we structure and fund OA has included removing APCs and will result in more (potentially all) of our content being OA immediately upon publication. Usage must therefore become the primary yardstick by which we measure and report on the success or failure of our OA transition. Furthermore, as a publisher with a strong portfolio of review journals, which commission and publish articles in order to spread understanding of our subject, we have a particular interest in charting our content’s use and reach...."