Peter Scott's Library Blog directed me to the Research Information Network (RIN) report E-journals: their use, value and impact which looked at how researchers use ejournals and the impact and value to intitutions and the contribution e-journals make to research productivity, quality and outcomes.

According to Peter, many surveys have been done on how much researchers welcome access to online journals but until now there hasn't been an evidence based study giving a detailed potrait of the information seeking behavior, usage of online journals, and benefits of that use.

This report examined the log files from journal websites and data from libraries in ten universities and research institions in the UK.


The full report is available here:

E-journals_use_value_impact_April2009.pdf 2.09 MB
Aims_scope_methods_context_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf 490.02 KB
Journal_spending_use_outcomes_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf 1.44 MB
Bibliometric_indicators_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf 254.68 KB
Information_usage_behaviour_CIBER_ejournals_working_paper.pdf 1022.12 KB



I am still going through the report but here are some bits of information that I found interesting or bears repeating.

• E-journals are used HEAVILY - The 13 yr old me that wants to say, "Duh we know that already." But I think this important to repeat because I have had conversations with librarians who don't think anybody is going to use the electronic journals. This report stated in four months the users of the 10 institutions visited nearly 1,400 ScienceDirect journals half a million times and viewed 1.5 million pages! This type of usage isn't limited to ScienceDirect. Users accessed Oxford Journals over 750,000 times and viewed over 600,000 pages in a year.
• The vast majority of users get access to journals from third party sites such as PubMed and stay long enough just to download the full text. I think this is extremely important information for libraries and journal publishers. Libraries need to make sure their link resolvers and the PubMed linkouts are working correctly and publishers need to make sure they make it easy for third party sites to access their journals. LWW titles come to mind. If people are searching on Google or Google Scholar they are never going to hit the full text of an LWW title in Ovid.
• Users are accessing the journals during non-working hours. Nearly a quarter of ScienceDirect use occured "outside the traditional 9-5 working day." Weekend use accounted for 15% of total use.
• Google is a major player. Once journal content is opened up to Google for indexing, Google is then used by large numbers. Four months after ScienceDirect opened physics content to Google, more than a third of the traffic came from Google. Google popularity and usage further illustrated with Oxford Journals. Oxford Journals have been open to Google for quite a while and over half of their traffic comes from Google.

It is a very interesting report. I can't wait until I am finished reading all of it.

Labels: Publishing Industry, Technology