What does Elsevier count

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What does Elsevier count?

• Use Measures for Electronic Resources
• Theory Practice
• ALCTS Program, ALA, Chicago

Daviess Menefee Director, Library Relations,
Americas Date June 27, 2005
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My Agenda for today

• Part 1 Some history on usage reporting with
  ScienceDirect
• Part 2 Present some of the business aspects of
  usage from a publishers point of view
• Part 3 Look at a couple of interesting results
  on usage and its reporting from our internal
  studies

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Not too long ago.

• ScienceDirect usage reports were
• Word Documents
• Derived by processing logfiles on a PC, over a
  single weekend
• Provided only the barest of data
• Began with 6 insisting customers
• Delivered via email by the assigned Account
  Manager
• Never detailed what was not used.

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Did we know what we were doing?

• We thought so.
• Some internal concern over the potential impact
  of usage reports on subscriptions
• No standard or benchmarks to follow
• Navigating in the dark
• Had high hopes to advance the science of usage
  reporting and analysis. But we didnt know what
  that was.
• Usage reporting grew organically from the demands
  of the market as well as the business.

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And then we made some mistakes.

• Usage reporting and transactional downloads were
  not fully reconcilable. Two different systems in
  play.
• Not including 0 usage in the reports caused a
  degree of unreliability in the reports.
• Trying to define sessions in a session-less state
  was not very productive.

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But then we did some good things.

• Published a white paper indicating that we were
  reducing the number of downloads based on user
  behavior. (Our sales staff were not pleased.)
• Invested heavily in designing and implementing a
  state of the art system that could provide
  reports directly to the customer.
• Supported the establishment of Counter.

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Did we learn anything?

• Yes, about customer reporting. We have improved
  as an industry in defining and delivering them.
  We have come a long way.
• We have created a trusted third party group to
  monitor and audit the reports.
• We continue to study user behavior and try to
  understand it better.

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Part 2 Why does Elsevier count usage?

• Data for business information such as
• Trends
• Product Performance
• Return On Investment
• Need Data for Informed decisions
• Determine Future Directions, ex Pricing

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Elsevier Management Reports

• Produced Monthly
• Summarize Key Performance Indicators
• Indicators Major Areas
• Content
• System
• Customers
• Other (Links, trials, Web Editions, etc.)

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Performance Indicators for SD

• Content Indicators
• Number of Journals
• Number of Abstracts
• Number of full-text articles available
• System Performance
• Number of Page Requests
• Total Full-text articles downloaded, PDF/HTML
• Total Articles incl. SD On Site
• Total Searches

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Performance Indicators, 2

• Customers
• Number of Contracts
• Number of Registered Accounts
• Number of Active Accounts
• Estimated number of user sessions
• Number of Active Users (cookie based)

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More on Performance Indicators

• Other areas measured
• Trial Customers
• Guest Usage
• Esp. Article downloads (PPV)
• Web Editions (limited to customer base
  statistics)
• Promotional Usage
• Scirus (no. of searches and indexed pages)
• Linking Indicators

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What is the point?

• Company has set target numbers for most areas of
  the KPIs.
• Change our thinking from traditional publishing
  to how to grow an electronic journals--books
  business.
• Enables the setting of objectives and priorities.
• Publishing units now have usage goals.

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Product Management Reports

• Opportunity for product managers to review and
  comment on trends or explain why a number is out
  of proportion.
• Examples
• Usage of abstracts decreased during the month but
  the number of guests users increased.
• MathML increased this month over last month and
  points to a trend of continuing growth.

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Data is converted to graphs
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Whats worth counting?

• Just about everything that involves end users and
  content.
• Full-text Articles are the norm but Elsevier also
  continues to monitor browsing behavior especially
  from guest users (a possible new market).
• Important to look at changes and how that effects
  any usage (training, system changes, etc.)

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Part 3 Some Internal Studies

• 1. Referring URL Study
• Who is sending us the traffic?
• What are the subject areas where users come into
  the product?
• 2. Usage on Usage Study
• Are these reports really being used?
• Who is using them?
• What triggers use?

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Traffic Referrals to SD

• Major Sites (95)
• Customers OPACs
• PubMed
• Elsevier Site Cell Press
• Cross Ref
• ChemPort
• Search Engines (Scirus)

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Referrals as a Chart
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SD Entry by Subject Areas
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Some Analysis on Subject Entry

• Life Science end users prefer to come into
  ScienceDirect from 3rd party sources, namely the
  AI databases
• Humanities and Social Scientists prefer the
  Journal Home Page on ScienceDirect
• For some areas there appears no difference
  Energy, Chemical Engineering, Mat Sciences and
  Engineering.

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2. Usage of Usage Reports

• Internal Elsevier Study of use of ScienceDirect
  usage reports
• Who uses usage reports?
• Asia/Pacific Librarians lead the list
• What triggers use of these reports
• Email Alerts
• Asia/Pacific has the most alerts set up
• 63 customers use the reports when they have an
  alert as opposed to 30 without the alert.

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Effect of Alerts
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Popular Usage Reports
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Number of Reports over time
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Usage Reports did we over build?

• ScienceDirect data may indicate such.
• But the data may be useful some day and probably
  best to keep it at hand for now.
• Are there more functional reports that should be
  developed, e.g. factor in cost of content for
  performance measure?

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To really end this presentation-

• We still do not know enough about user behavior
  and how that affects the numbers.
• We do know that the users are disparate and have
  different usage patterns in their respective
  subjects.
• Open question what are meaningful numbers and in
  what context. Answer may be a local solution.
• Publishers dont have all the answers either.

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Thank You!

• d.menefee_at_elsevier.com