The Data Analysis Working Group of SPARC’s Negotiation Community of Practice has collaboratively developed the resources linked below to support libraries in better leveraging data in negotiations with publishers.
Introduction: Introduces the work of the Data Analysis Working Group as part of the Journal Negotiation Community of Practice.
Open Access Agreements: Factors to Consider: This document provides an overview of questions and factors to consider when evaluating potential investments in open access. It is a companion to Data Sources for Analyzing Open Access Offers from Publishers.
Open Access Data Sources: This document outlines free and subscription-based data sources, their purposes and uses for analyzing open access publishing, as well as their strengths and weaknesses and suggestions for additional assistance.
COUNTER 4 vs. COUNTER 5: This document offers a brief overview of the changes between reports and metrics from COUNTER 4 to COUNTER 5, and will help the librarian to support year-over-year analysis of their usage statistics.
Overlap Analysis: Overlap analyses can help clarify the uniqueness of, and similarities between, two or more databases or collections, and the extent of overlap between resources. Knowing the overlap between collections can help you to make informed collections decisions, including whether to acquire, renew, drop or change access level (ex. Change from full text version to A&I) for a resource or collection.
Qualitative Data: Qualitative data provide contextual depth when used in concert with quantitative data, explaining the why behind quantitative analysis. This short article explains how qualitative data could be integrated into collection assessment for negotiations.
Usage Statistics: This document provides a high-level overview of why libraries collect online resource usage statistics, what types of usage statistics they can collect, and ways they collect them.
Turnaways: Turnaways can be a useful metric to assess the impact of cancellation when used in conjunction with ILL data and qualitative surveys. This article defines the various forms of turnaway data and recommends a few factors to consider when looking at turnaway reports.
Serials Transparency Lists: A Serials Transparency List includes an institution’s electronic resource pricing and inflation information over time. The list, which includes vendor names and product titles, makes it easy for other libraries to compare their pricing and annual increases for specific publisher deals to those offered to that institution.
Data Visualization: Data visualizations can assist in telling the story about your library’s data in terms of journal negotiations and planning. This document contains links to articles, presentations, and Tableau Public boards from various other higher education libraries who have used data visualization to present journal data to their stakeholders with advice on methods, tools, and pitching.
Cost Per Use: Cost-per-use data can be used to assess the value of online collections. Various methods of gathering and using the data are presented including some limitations in applying CPU data.
Full Text Coverage Ratios: The Full Text Coverage ratio can shed light on the relative strength of holdings in particular subject areas. It allows you say to “We’re able to provide roughly X% of what we have indexed in this area.”
Glossary: Glossary of terms used within analysis for journal negotiations.
Interlibrary Loan Analysis: Looking at patterns in ILL requests over time can give the library an idea of demand, titles requested, areas of deficiency, and potential sources to acquire.
These resources are being temporarily hosted on the main SPARC website while a separate site for SPARC’s Negotiation Community of Practice is being built. Once the site completed, these pages will redirect to their long-term home there.
