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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).

The paper exploits usage statistics and subscription data from a national usage study of an academic publisher. Data are from 2010.

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.

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.

The paper considers the opportunity provided by big deal 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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between electronic journal downloads and citations and whether online electronic resource usage can be adopted as an alternative to citation for evaluation of scholarly discourse.

A consolidated 16 publishers’ COUNTER usage data of UGC-Infonet members was collected from INFLIBNET Centre. The usage was meticulously filtered from UGC-subscribed journals and institutional subscriptions. The quantitative data were analysed to establish the relationship between download, impact factor (IF) and price. Multiple regression analysis was used to assess the influence of price and IF on usage and to predict the usage when they are known and the threshold for significance was set at p < 0.05.

There exists a relationship between IF and downloads of journals in UGC-Infonet. Journal IF and price significantly influence usage, where journal IF plays an important role in the intensity of the use. Also, the top 25 hottest downloaded papers were journals with IF; hence, no journal without IF featured in the top 25 most downloaded journals in the consortia. The relationship between the top 25 IF journals in the consortia and download is strong (r = 0.368537).

The only account that reports on the relationship between journal IFs and downloads for UGC-Infonet consortia. Also, the influence of usage behaviour with respect to citation and price of a journal.

The paper of this paper is to explore the usage patterns of e-journals in French business schools.

The paper exploits COUNTER-compliant usage statistics from a nationwide usage study with data from journal collections of an international academic publisher.

With regard to online collections, the usage appears to be relatively intensive, especially when compared to usage statistics from universities in the same fields. This result may reflect an emerging research activity in business schools and a projected and required international orientation. However, the study also reveals important differences between schools, a fact that should not be overestimated because of the small sample size, even if the sample is a representative of French business schools.

The paper uses empirical data from a national usage study to identify specific patterns in business schools. It does not integrate qualitative survey data or deep log file analysis.

Very few studies provide empirical evidence of e-journal usage in business schools. The paper enhances the knowledge on usage in specific environments in higher education. This is the first usage study with French business schools.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of quantitative and qualitative analysis of the usage of e‐resources in academic libraries. It also describes various studies undertaken to study the users' behavior and attitude towards e‐journals.

The paper provides a comprehensive review of the recent published literature on the importance of the usage statistics of e‐resources subscribed to by the academic libraries.

The findings show that the usage statistics help in studying and evaluating the users' behavior in an online environment. The library services can be extended and modified, to reflect user interests suiting the users the most, in the light of the evaluation and analyses done.

The paper has pertinence and wider implications for library staff engaged in providing e‐resources' services to readers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a library with useful information about selection criteria for an electronic resource assessment system and practical assistance on how to implement efficiently such a system.

The paper is based on literature review, desk research, and implementation experience.

The paper identifies a number of homegrown, open‐source, and commercial electronic resource assessment systems and discusses their selection criteria. Based on the implementation of 360 Counter, the paper details the efficient way to implement the system.

Collecting usage statistics is very important to make informed and well‐rounded collection decisions. Libraries are seeking suitable measuring tools to meet their needs. This paper reviews several electronic resource assessment systems, discusses the selection criteria and implementation process of 360 Counter, and detailed learned lessons as well. Future directions for usage statistics are also explored. It is believed that the deployment experience should be instructive when carrying out similar projects.

The paper seeks to emphasize the necessity of evaluating the library resources in terms of their quality, cost benefit and usefulness.

In the context of subscribing to the latest e‐journal databases in university libraries, different types of usage studies are discussed, including the recent application of usage log data or vendor reports. The genesis, standardization of usage reports and the significance of COUNTER statistics in establishing the usefulness of the e‐journals are described. The use of various electronic databases by the University of Hyderabad academic community is referred to according to these statistics/reports, mentioning the way in which it is helpful to university library in assessing their actual usage and usefulness.

The paper highlights the application of usage reports by the university library in decision making during renewals/subscriptions, i.e. the selection of databases, upgrading the versions, increasing licences, cancellation of subscriptions, etc.

All in all, it is established that the usage reports are to be taken as a support to library decision‐making activity, since it reflects the true value of e‐journals/databases.

This study provides necessary direction to library management regarding the utilization of log data for assessing the true value of e‐journals/databases. Thus the usage statistics can be studied and this analysis will invariably support the complex decision‐making activity of serials management in university libraries.

To provide a review of the log analysis studies of use and users of scholarly electronic journals.

The advantages and limitations of log analysis are described and then past studies of e‐journals' use and users that applied this methodology are critiqued. The results of these studies will be very briefly compared with some survey studies. Those aspects of online journals' use and users studies that log analysis can investigate well and those aspects that log analysis can not disclose enough information about are highlighted.

The review indicates that although there is a debate about reliability of the results of log analysis, this methodology has great potential for studying online journals' use and their users' information seeking behaviour.

This paper highlights the strengths and weaknesses of log analysis for studying digital journals and raises a couple of questions to be investigated by further studies.

Using COUNTER‐compliant statistics, the purpose of this study is to conduct an in‐depth analysis of usage of online journals in a group of major UK universities.

The paper describes in detail developments, as well as other progress made on COUNTER since the 2003 Northumbria conference. It also addresses the practical challenges faced by vendors and librarians in implementing COUNTER, and concludes with future plans for the project.

The study team has successfully collected and validated a considerable set of journal usage, subscription and cost data and has assisted in the testing and validation of the “successful full‐text article request” as a possible unit of measurement of “usage” that can be applied consistently and reliably across all publishers.

The paper shows how usage relates to costs, institution profile and subject spread and develops a set of measures that are likely to be used more widely as indicators of the value of online journals.

To test the breadth of appeal of the 2005 Emerald Management Xtra collection of over 100 business and management journals using aggregated usage data gathered from the Emerald web site. To test whether the “80/20 rule”, or Pareto principle, of 80 per cent of the usage by all Emerald customers coming from 20 per cent of the titles in the database is true. To compare the results of this study with those obtained by the Consortium of University Libraries, Catalonia (CBUC) for their usage of database products from Emerald and other publishers.

The analysis was made based on article downloads by all Emerald customers from COUNTER Journal Report 1 Release 1 compliant usage data. The journals were ranked in order of decreasing usage and then accumulated percentage usage was compared with accumulated percentage titles.

That across all Emerald customers 80 per cent of usage came from 47.4 per cent of titles. This result compared well with the CBUC study that found an 80:46.2 relationship for Emerald usage. The CBUC study found an 80:34.5 relationship across all the publishers’ products included in their analysis.

This study found that usage by all Emerald customers of the journals that make up the Emerald Management Xtra database far exceeded the Pareto principle assumption. This was also true for one Emerald consortium customer in Spain.

The study concludes that a subject‐focused “big deal”, such as the Emerald Management Xtra product, represents excellent value for customers. It contains many relevant titles in a package that is deeply discounted and costs far less than purchasing just the most used titles individually.

This is the first study by a publisher that analyses the aggregated usage data for all of its customers. It demonstrates the value and utility of the electronic journal database, or “big deal”.

This article presents the early findings of an exploratory deep log analysis of journal usage on OhioLINK, conducted as part of the MaxData project funded by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services. OhioLINK, the original “big deal”, provides a single digital platform of nearly 6,000 full‐text journal for more than 600,000 people in the state of Ohio. The purpose of the paper is not only to present findings from the deep log analysis of journal usage on OhioLINK, but, arguably more importantly, to try test a new method of analysing online information user behaviour – deep log analysis.

The raw server logs were obtained for the period June 2004 to December 2004. For this exploratory study one month (October) of the on‐campus usage logs and seven months of the off‐campus transaction logs were analysed.

During this period approximately 1,215,000 items were viewed on campus in October 2004 and 1,894,000 items viewed off campus between June and December 2004. The paper presents a number of usage analyses including: number of journals used, titles of journals used, use over time, a returnee analysis and a special analysis of subject, date and method of access.

The research findings help libraries evaluate the efficiency of big deal and one‐stop shopping for scholarly journals and also investigate their users' information seeking behaviours.

The research is a part of efforts to test the applications of a new methodology, deep log analysis, for use and user studies. It also represents the most substantial independent analysis of, possibly, the most important and significant of the journal big deals ever conducted.