Tracking usage of available scholarly content

"Following the pandemic outbreak a large number of publishers are making content unilaterally available over different periods, creating a natural experiment on scholarly content usage at an unprecedented scale. As we deal with the immediate issues, our minds have also turned to how we can learn the most from current events. This includes taking the opportunity to gain insights from what is one the largest experiments in online scholarly content access in history.

Our request to you is to: 1. Act to collect and preserve whatever usage data is currently being collected, for any content, both open and closed, and particularly to ensure the retention of data from the past few months 2. Make a record of what content you have chosen to open up and on what dates At the moment we *are*not* collecting data, only asking you to preserve relevant data that may be of use. Our plan is to move to collect and start processing data in a month or two as we settle into the new normal and our project progresses. You may decide at that point that you do not want to share all the data you have at that point, but if the data doesn't exist then you won't be able to make that choice...."