Citation
(2014), "2013 Awards for Excellence", Library Review, Vol. 63 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-05-2014-001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2013 Awards for Excellence
Article Type: 2013 Awards for Excellence From: Library Review, Volume 63, Issue 1/2
The following article was selected for this year's Outstanding Paper Award for Library Review
Big deal and long tail: e-journal usage and subscriptions
Joachim Schöpfel
Department of Information and Document Science, University of Lille 3, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France
Claire Leduc
ISCID, International Business Institute, University of the Littoral and Cote d'Opale, Dunkirk, France
Purpose This paper is aimed primarily at academic library managers and acquisition librarians. By analogy to Pareto studying the relationship between clients and turnover, the paper will study subscriptions to e-journals and usage statistics. The aim is to evaluate the long tail of usage statistics and to compare it with subscription lists of individually selected titles and packages (big deals).
Design/methodology/approach The paper exploits usage statistics and subscription data from a national usage study of an academic publisher. Data are from 2010.
Findings Usage statistics are partly shaped by the long tail effect. Individual subscriptions of journals are more selective than big deals, and trend towards a traditional retail curve. Unlike subscriptions through packages, usage and individual subscriptions can be related by a similar inclination. But, both types of subscriptions fail to predict the popularity of a title in its usage.
Research limitations/implications The paper uses data from a national usage study and tries to identify global trends. Thus, it does not distinguish between customer categories, disciplines or activity domains.
Practical implications The paper considers the opportunity provided by big deals for acquisition policy. Ready-made big deals sometimes appear as an unbounded and excessive supply, not suited to true and sufficient users’ needs, but on the other hand, selective acquisition policy cannot completely anticipate online usage behaviour.
Originality/value Only a few studies distinguish Pareto from long tail distributions in usage statistics, and there is little empirical evidence on the impact of selected subscriptions versus big deals on these statistics.
Keywords Academic publishing; Acquisition policy; Big deals; Business model; E-journals; Electronic publishing; Long tail; Periodical subscriptions; Subscriptions; Usage statistics
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/00242531211288245
This article originally appeared in Volume 61 Number 7, 2012, pp. 497-510
The following articles were selected for this year's Highly Commended Award
Plugging the “whole”: librarians as interdisciplinary facilitators
Jeffrey A. Knapp
This article originally appeared in Volume 61 Number 3, 2012
Pinning down a novel: characteristics of literary works as perceived by readers
Alenka Šauperl
This article originally appeared in Volume 61 Number 4, 2012
Baby boomers, their elders and the public library
Mary F. Cavanagh, Wendy Robbins
This article originally appeared in Volume 61 Number 8/9, 2012