Valuing your Licence workshop

On 24 September 2010 Knowledge Exchange organised a workshop in Glasgow focusing on how usage statistics can or cannot be used as a basis for managerial decisions on licences. Examples of projects were presented on how usage statistics are used for defining strategies. Usage portals developed in the UK and Germany were demonstrated. During the afternoon a session took place on the sharing of statistical information regarding e-journals. Questions regarding the relevance of international comparisons, privacy and non-disclosure were discussed. This workshop follows on earlier Knowledge Exchange workshops on Usage Statistics and their outcomes, including a briefing paper Combined Usage Statistics as the basis for Research Intelligence.

The impact of Open Access outside of European Universities

The Open Access movement has encouraged the availability of publicly-funded research papers, data and learning content for barrier-free use of that content without payment by the user. The impact of increasing availability of content to researchers in European universities is understood in terms of easier access to previous research and greater exposure for new research results, bringing benefits to the research community itself. A new culture of informal sharing is evident within the teaching and learning communities and to some extent also within the research community, but as yet the growth in informal sharing has not had a major effect upon the use of formal publication choices. This briefing paper explores the impact of open access upon potential users of research outputs outside the walls of research-led European universities, where the economic value of open access may be even greater than the academic value within universities. The potential impact of open access is understood in many communities but requires a greater volume of open access content to be available for the full potential to be realised. More open access content will become available as the opportunities in open, internet-based digital scholarship are understood. This briefing paper was written in cooperation with SPARC Europe. All links provided in footnotes in this Briefing Paper are to studies available in open access.