Continued growth in open-access (OA) resources has left us all struggling to understand and communicate their impact—a challenge that we need to solve in order to justify the funding needed to sustain momentum. Understanding impact is complicated by the lack of standards; we’re all experimenting with various approaches but which one(s) should we adopt? Communicating impact is complicated by the diverse range of stakeholders involved in OA. This session brings together three diverse perspectives to explore the issues, raise questions and help us all start to make sense of this space.
One of the challenges facing our industry is building on standards like COUNTER to support the much more diverse range of use cases and stakeholders wanting to understand the impact of OA publishing. Traditional reporting focuses on how resources are used, but for many funders it’s also critical to understand which audiences are engaging with content and how those align to funding priorities—a particular challenge as usage patterns shift off-campus and privacy becomes ever more important online.
As more publishers transition their publishing models to support OA, we are seeing usage soar. While an increase in global usage is something to celebrate, increases in unauthenticated use, new patterns around who and where content is accessed from, and how patrons are engaging are emerging. How do publishers demonstrate these changes and understand the impact to libraries, authors, funders, and new kinds of users? How do libraries communicate the value of OA resources to our scholars, administrators, and communities? In this paper, we will look at OA challenges and opportunities from different perspectives. What are libraries doing to embrace changes in publishing, what are publishers doing to support them, and what can data providers do to bring the needs of each together?