Recalibrating Cost-per-Use: Implications of COUNTER Release 5 and Unsub

Abstract

Calculating the cost-per-use of serials is a common practice in academic libraries, but the accuracy of these calculations requires accurate, comparable usage counts, and shortcomings of previous standards have made obtaining such counts difficult. Librarians may also want to exclude some uses, for example of open access articles, from their cost-per-use calculations, but these uses have often been difficult to identify. This column discusses two recent developments, the adoption of COUNTER Release 5 and the release of an online tool called Unsub, that will lead to improvements in usage counting and a significant readjustment of cost-per-use calculations for many libraries.

Keywords:

• Cost-per-use
• cost effectiveness
• COUNTER
• Unsub
• usage reports

Notes

1 This is a simplified explanation of Unsub and how it works. For more information about Unsub and the data it uses, one can refer to the UnSub documentation (Priem & Piwowar, n.d.). The creators of Unsub were also interviewed earlier this year in an article for The Scholarly Kitchen (Hinchliffe, 2020). Both the interview and the discussion in the comments section are helpful for understanding Unsub and some of its possible implications for the publishing world.