For a long time, there were just two main citation sources that had data that could claim to be relatively comprehensive multi-discipline wise, namely Web of Science and Scopus. (We will come to Google Scholar later). As I noted in past posts (here, here), this has changed in the last 2 years, new citation sources both  proprietary such as Dimensions, and open such as OpenCitations Corpus have started to emerge.

Where I speculate about how the concepts of skill caps and performance caps and the views that librarians implictly hold on them in these two dimensions, affect how they engage with them. I recently started playing Hearthstones a digital collectable card game and like most games in this genre, certain combinations of cards are quickly identified as “metagame defining” and dominate the game.

In this week's blog entry, I cover three new stories of interest that have one common thread - issues affecting the measurement of journal usage. The three stories are 1. A loophole in COUNTER? Are some publisher platforms double counting downloads? 2. More granular analysis of ezproxy logs?

It has been over 2 years ago in Jun 2017, where I picked up on the growing trend of library discovery services and Abstract and indexing servicing intergrating open access content into their indexes.  How are things today?

Updated 27/8/2019 - Libkey Nomad now supports open access via Unpaywall (accepted manuscript) on top of full OA journals already in Libkey Knowledgebase. Kopernio now allows institutions which are WOS customers to setup library link resolver as a fall-back. Updated 28/8/2019 -

Back in 2016, I wrote a fairly controversial

In 2018, I started noticing an increasing number of startups that focused on applying machine learning in the Libraries and Scholarly Communication arena. There were tools such as Scholarcy, Paper Digest and Get the Research that auto summarizes articles, while companies like UNSILO were applying machine learning to publisher manuscript submission systems like ScholarOne.

In academia, the print paradigm still holds sway. For instance, I've argued that our citation practices makes no sense in our largely digital era. That said, quite a bit of the content, we read, cite and use are available only in hard copy , or failing that content in PDF that can't be easily manipulated in digital formats.

It has been over a year in April 2018 since I had the opportunity to present at two panels in  conferences alongside experts such  as Lisa Hinchliffe, Johan Tilstra (Founder Lean Library), Jason Priem (Cofounder Unpaywall), Ben Kaube (Cofounder Kopernio) on the topic of browser extensions that help users gain quick access to the full text of articles while browsing the web.

The news that University of California system cancelled their deal with Elsevier seemed to have caused a bit of a stir all over the world, including here in Singapore and I was asked to do a talk to brief faculty on the latest trends in this area. The more I researched the more interested I got. What were institutions and consortiums doing to better their bargaining position with the big publishers?

Most people agree with Open Access is a good thing to have, but  a lot of the debate resolves over business models and the cost we should pay for it. Fundamentally, the question is how much is the output worth? While it isn't perfect, Librarians use cost per use figures in negotiations and discussions on whether to renew something but how are cost per use figures usually calculated?