Academic publisher Brill, Netherlands, has announced its participation in the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP), a portal that provides a single point of access for usage statistics. Each University can now quickly and easily compare usage across various publishers, years and journals.
The new service was built in response to demand from the UK HE community. At a time of economic constraint, it is essential that libraries can evaluate usage and make a compelling case about the value of journal subscriptions, and COUNTER compliant data is vital in making such a case. However, obtaining and analysing COUNTER compliant data can be extremely labour intensive with each library having to visit each publisher's website and download their COUNTER compliant statistics. They then need to collate the datasets and analyse them.
The JUSP Portal provides a single point of access for usage statistics, meaning that each University can quickly and easily compare usage across various publishers, years and NESLi journals. This free service provides UK Universities with empirical evidence to inform the management and procurement of e-journals.
The Portal uses the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol to collect the COUNTER compliant statistics, which are then displayed to each institution in an easy to read way. The portal provides tools to aid fast analysis and makes it possible for libraries to compare their usage of different publisher deals, to look at trends over time and to complete their annual SCONUL returns from participating publishers. Institutions will use this information to plan developments in their library systems that will aid resource discovery and increase usage.
