The Journals Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) consortium has announced that STM publisher Elsevier has confirmed its participation in the new portal service, built in response to demand from the UK higher education (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. COUNTER compliant data is seen to be 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 seeks to provide a single point of access for usage statistics, meaning that each university can quickly and easily compare usage across various publishers, years and NESLijournals. This free service seeks to provide UK universities with empirical evidence to inform the management and procurement of e-journals.
The portal uses the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Harvesting Initiative) protocol to collect the COUNTER compliant statistics, which are then displayed to each institution in an easy to read way. It provides tools to aid fast analysis and makes it possible for libraries to compare their usage of different NESLi2 publisher deals, to look at trends over time and to complete their annual SCONUL returns from NESLi2 publishers. The portal will also enable benchmarking. Institutions will be able to compare their own usage with of other of anonymised institutions in the same JISC Band, or with a similar FTE. Institutions will use this information to plan developments in their library systems that will aid resource discovery and increase usage.
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