Delta Think: “How Does the Growth of a Particular Publisher’s Open Access Content Factor Into the Relative Value of a Big Deal? Part 2: The Findings”

From a Delta Think Blog Post by Heather Staines:

This month’s News & Views is the second part of an article derived from ongoing research involving Michael Levine-Clark, John McDonald, Jason Price, and Heather Staines. This content, and the previous April 2022 News & Views, is based on a session presented at the Charleston Conference in November 2021.

Now that data sources for both institutions and publishers have been identified and usage outliers removed, we can get to the analysis of whether growth in OA affects value.

First, let’s look at usage of our two publishers’ content at the broad level of Carnegie class. (Figure 1) To recap, there is a group of eight libraries in the R1 Very High Research activity category with an average student FTE of 37,000. Our 12 smaller institutions, the R2+ group, have an average student FTE of 8,700. We see a higher average usage in the R1 group, with 38-42 uses per student FTE. Meanwhile, the R2+ group average 13-15 uses per student. For both groups, open access gold usage accounted for approximately 10% of the controlled usage.

Learn More, Read the Complete Blog Post (about 1400 words + 13 Charts)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Libraries, News, Open Access