LibLynx & PSI Metrics Deliver Reporting Milestone for PLOS
Information Community News
November 16, 2021
A collaboration between LibLynx & PSI Metrics has enabled the Public Library of Science (PLOS) to become the first wholly Open Access (OA) publisher to deliver Release 5 COUNTER-compliant usage reporting to the library community. This is an important milestone in the development of usage reporting that meets the growing needs of the OA movement.
PLOS and LibLynx announced a partnership in 2020 to develop ground-breaking analytics that communicate the usage and impact of OA content to their stakeholder communities, and libraries in particular. The first phase of this initiative was to deliver COUNTER reports to PLOS institutional partners that enable them to understand their usage of PLOS OA content.
Unlike traditional paywalled access scenarios, users engaging with OA content do not need to be authorized and so their organizational affiliation is unknown at the point of access. Generating COUNTER reporting for the PLOS library community required the development of custom processing logic by LibLynx that attributed OA usage to organizations based on matching their registered IP addresses against data from PSI Metrics.
“This is a huge milestone for us. The development of next generation metrics for wholly-OA content is one of the great benefits of our Open Access agreements with institutions, and we are delivering on that promise,” said Sara Rouhi, Director of Strategic Partnerships, PLOS.
“COUNTER very much welcomes PLOS becoming a publisher compliant with the Code of Practice. Our consultations with the library community, our OA Advisory Group and ongoing workshops demonstrate a demand for COUNTER reports from fully OA publishers, as part of the evaluation of the return on investment associated with open access content,” said Lorraine Estelle, Project Director, COUNTER.
Having engaged with the community over the last year to better understand their reporting needs, PLOS and LibLynx are now working on the development of new, more flexible reporting tools to better understand usage and impact of OA content.
About These Organizations
About LibLynx (www.liblynx.com)
LibLynx provides flexible Identity, Access Management, and Analytics solutions to online resource providers and libraries. We make identity & access as simple as possible and as secure as necessary and deliver insightful analytics that are on-demand and in real time. We mitigate the risks of fraud and managing personal data. Our cloud native applications are technology and platform independent, with an architecture designed to simplify integration and facilitate customization.
About PSI (www.psiregistry.org)
PSI is an independent company and is the brainchild of two veterans of the publishing world who, between them, hold over 50 years of STM publishing experience. It was while working for major publishers that they recognised a number of problems facing the industry that could only be overcome through communication, collaboration and innovation. PSI now finds itself in a unique position to facilitate cooperation among the various stakeholders of the academic library and publishing world for the benefit of the whole community. PSI enables libraries, publishers and membership societies to work together, securely and confidentially, towards the common goals of facilitating legitimate access to scholarly content, providing reliable data through the interrogation of IP addresses, and combating cybercrime.
About PLOS (www.plos.org)
PLOS is a nonprofit, open access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. Since our founding in 2001, PLOS journals have helped break boundaries in research communication to provide more opportunities, choice, and context for researchers and readers.
About COUNTER (www.projectcounter.org)
COUNTER provides the standard that enables the knowledge community to count the use of electronic resources. Known as the Code of Practice, the standard ensures vendors and publishers can provide their library customers with consistent, credible and comparable usage data.
