The evolving librarian - reconsidering teaching of boolean, CRAAP for fake news and calculating open adjusted cost per use | Musings about librarianship

"Life and libraries is always changing and evolving. A lot of our standard practices date back decades, but as the environment changes, we librarians should always consider if our tools or practices are in the need of a change or if they can be reused to tackle the same problem in a different form. I've recently being inspired by the arguments and evidence from various blog  posts and articles to reconsider or consider the following  

• The effectiveness of teaching of Boolean particularly to first years
• Teaching CRAAP test as a tool to spot and handle fake news
• Using of levels of open access to adjust cost per use...

Measuring cost per use with adjustments of level of open access

As levels of open access rise, the idea of possibly replacing subscriptions with Green OA versions have started to appear. See for example my posts "Academic libraries in a mixed open access & paywall world — Can we substitute open access for paywalled articles?" or even more directly Ryan Regier's  “The problem with using cost-per use analysis to justify journal subscriptions”."

This idea remains controversial for many reasons, in particular you can't guarantee the version of the open access variant you get but still this has not stopped the author of Leveraging the Growth of  Open Access in Library Collection Decision Making to make a intriguing proposal.

Of course you are familar with the  idea of valuing subscriptions based on cost per use and using that as a factor to rank or rate journals for renewal.

The author of the paper suggests that one should tweak the cost per use taking into account levels of Open Access.

For example, say it's 2018, if the number of downloads for the year of 2017 for that articles published in 2017 for the journal is 100, and 10% of the articles in that publication year (2017) are Open Access, the adjusted usage = 100 X (1-0.1) = 90 downloads

The idea here is that because 10% of the content is open access and free, on average, they could have been replaced by OA usage. You use that "OA-adjusted usage" to calculate cost per use...."