Case study: analysing the 'Big Deal' using COUNTER Reports
07 December 2021Expenditure on ‘big deals’ accounts for a large part of library acquisition budgets, and in this case study a UK university assessed the value of those deals using their COUNTER Reports.
The study concluded that, while several factors contribute to decision-making for ‘big deals’, cost-per-use is a key indicator: high cost-per-use might mean that a deals needs further investigation. By making use of COUNTER’s standardised metrics, the library was able to confidently compare cost per use across different publishers.
“COUNTER data provides a standardised reliable metric for comparing deal data across packages and over time, and the library involved in this case study will conduct this annual review of all the packages it subscribes to. Increasingly, as they enter into OA deals with publishers, they will also consider citation data and publication data in addition to usage data.”
Lorraine Estelle
This case study was written and produced by Lorraine Estelle, with support from JUSP at Jisc.