Knowledge Unlatched (KU), a not-for- profit company based in England, has announced that it will be launching institutional usage statistics reports in November for libraries which participated in KU's Pilot Open Access e-book collection.
The reports are based on institutional IP addresses using COUNTER-compliant data provided by one of KU's official hosting platforms, OAPEN. Until now, KU has been publishing aggregated reports for the Pilot Collection only.
Looking at the overall usage from HathiTrust and OAPEN, KU can reveal that the Pilot titles have been downloaded and viewed more than 100,000 times. In addition, from March 2014 to September 2016, the KU Pilot titles accumulated 28 percent more downloads than other English-language OAPEN titles for the same period.
The reports are the first step in tracking usage of Open Access books that are available under Creative Commons licences. The nature of Open Access means that the process is not straightforward as KU's books are hosted on multiple sites and can be easily shared. The increased discoverability that results from books being hosted on diverse platforms can only be beneficial, however combining usage data from multiple sources creates data blending challenges not only for books in the KU collection but for all OA books.
KU Research will next investigate methodologies for providing geolocational usage reports which will capture students accessing works off campus as well as help university libraries to assess the reach of these research works in their wider community.
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