Anurag Acharya, co-creator of Google Scholar asks: What happens when your library is worldwide and all articles are easy to find?

There was a real sense of anticipation in the room as co-creator of Google Scholar Anurag Acharya stepped up to make the first keynote of the 2015 ALPSP Conference.

Keynote... Anurag Acharya co-creator of @google scholar... I suspect this will be interesting!!! pic.twitter.com/ZTXNxIyUHT

— Simon Kerridge (@SimonRKerridge) September 9, 2015

Acharya harked back to his time at grad school in 1990. Print was the dominant format. Research had to be physically handled. Every library was limited or bound in different ways. There was wide distribution for core collections, each field would have its own small sets of journals, with wide visibility for published articles. But there was narrow distribution for other journals that were found in far fewer libraries leading to limited visibility for published articles.

Browse was the common way to find research: tables of content for newly arrived issues, bibliography sections of papers you read, shelves of the libraries you could walk to. Some libraries had search services that were often based on titles, authors, keywords, included abstracts. There was no full text indexing or no relevance ranking. The most recent came first. but if you couldn't find it, you can't learn from it! In every way you were limited, by shelves, by institution's budget, that which you don't know about.

Fast forward to 2015. Almost all journals worldwide are online. A large fraction of archives are online. Anyone anywhere can browse it all - let your fingers do the walking. Your library is worldwide - online shelves have no ends. Relevance ranking allows all articles to rise - all articles are equally easy to find, new or old, well-known journal or obscure. Full text indexing allows all sections to rise including conclusions and methods.

Anyone anywhere can find it all: all areas, all languages, all time. Your own area or your colleague's, latest research or well-read classics, free to all users. If you can get online you can join the entire global research community. There is so much more that you can actually read from big deal licenses, free archives, preprints to open access journals and articles.

Anurag Acharya, co-founder of Google Scholar: researchers not limited by what their library shelves can hold #alpsp15 pic.twitter.com/eUnlcYrMh2

— Bioscientifica (@bioscientifica) September 9, 2015

The transformation is fantastic - he could not have dreamt of this 25 years ago as a grad student. And publishers, societies, libraries and search services have together made this possible.

So how has researcher behaviour changed? What do they look for? What do they read? What do they cite? There is a tremendous growth in queries with many many more users and queries per user in all research and geographical areas.

Queries evolve: there has been the most growth in keyword/concept queries e.g. author name queries, known item queries. The average query length has increased to 4-5 words. There are multiple concepts or entities occur often and most queries are unique. Queries are no longer limited just to their own area. Relevance ranking makes exploration easy and broad queries return classics/seminal work. There's a mix of expert and non-expert queries from users with sustained growth in related area queries. The researcher is no longer limited to narrow areas.

What do they read? There has been steady and sustained growth per user as well as in diversity of areas per user compared to the growth in related areas queries. Users read much more shown through the growth in both abstracts and full texts.

There is more full text available than ever before. Iterative scanning is a common mode: do a query, scan. Abstracts that have full text links in the search interface are selected more frequently, even if they don't actually read the full text. PDF remains extremely popular for full text allowed what is important to the researcher to be accessible to them later.

They have undertaken research into what researchers cite and the evolution of citation patterns. The full report is published on the Google Scholar blog.

Anurag concluded by observing if it is useful, researchers will find/read/cite. The spread of attention is widening across the spectrum to non-elite journals (more specific, less known), older articles, regional journals and dissertations. Good ideas can come from anywhere and insights are not limited to the well-funded or to the web-published. The top 10 journals still publish many top papers: 85% in 1995 to 75% in 2013. The elite are as yet still elite, but less so.

Acharya steady and sustained drop in fraction of top papers in top journals ! #ALPSP15 pic.twitter.com/M4jjhItEMb

— Simon Kerridge (@SimonRKerridge) September 9, 2015

Research is inherently a process of filtering and abstracts are a crucial part of the filtering process. Forcing full text on early-stage users is not useful and limiting COUNTER stats to full text misses much of an article's utility to researchers.

He reflected that we are lucky to live in an era of information plenty. Better a glut than a famine.

Customers as competitors

Customers as competitors? Anderson, Taylor-Roe and Horova reflect.

The first plenary at the ALPSP International Conference 2014 focused on increased competition from the least likely sources - our customers - with the advent of digital publishing lowering barriers to entry.

Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections at the Marriott Library, University of Utah (also known as a Scholarly Kitchen Chef) chaired a panel comprising Jill Taylor-Roe, Deputy Librarian at Newcastle University Library, Tony Horova, Associate University Librarian at the University of Ottawa and Graham Stone, Information Resources Manager at the University of Huddersfield.

The University of Ottawa is the world's largest bilingual university and the Press and library have a close relationship at management and editorial level. They generate $300,000 sales each year with a simultaneous print and digital programme. Tony Horova shared the interim results of a research project they ran to track results of a Gold OA partnership. The OA partnership was between the University of Ottawa Press and the library was based around shared goals to improve sustainable dissemination of scholarly research.

The Open Access Funding Partnership is a three year agreement to support gold OA with CC licence for new monographs. The library subsidises a maximum of three titles per annum with a $10,000 subvention per title to a max of $30k per year. They have targeted titles of core contemporary social relevance. It is a three year project with the goal of assessing sales and dissemination so they can understand what it will mean for their future programme. Horova shared the results to date. Interestingly, including actual sales.

Where do they go from here? They are one of four university presses in Canada to have embraced OA and intend to remain on the cutting edge. they are assessing the project/consultation process and determining how to further incorporate OA into business model and strategic direction of the Press while discussing financial implications with the library.

Jill Taylor-Roe reflected on the ups and downs of relationships between librarians and publishers. How do we respond to change? We are in the midst of the most disruptive period in scholarly communications. The only real certainty for all of us is that more change will come. To survive and thrive you need to change and adapt.

One major change that publishers have to engage with is the involvement in research publishing decision of managers within an institution. When you come up against financial directors as agents of change, they become a significant influence. This is a different world, they were never involved before. They will ask lots of questions around why there are payments for fees, pages, illustrations etc. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

It is time to change and recalibrate scholarly communication models. Need to put each of our skill sets together to face this new world. In some instances there will be competition from university presses. It is good that the dialogue has been opened, but she is keen not to polarise the discussion.

Graham Stone spoke about the potential impact of open access repositories and library scholarly publishing on 'traditional' publishing models. He asked if we are not missing the point a little bit? Ultimately, what is more important? Is it the usage on your journal platform or is the actual impact of the research. He would argue that the latter sells content. Repositories that multiply access points help increase readership and impact. Repositories are not all that bad. They may well be helping.

Graham Stone steps up for the debate

Stealing your lunch? No. Gold OA in the repository? We paid for it. Green? We have an agreement to access it. If it is hybrid version, we're not only giving you lunch, but also letting you having your cake and eating it as we link to the publisher platform.

Don't waste your money on fancy sites that don't work on mobile. Researchers just require stuff. The PIRUS project from a few years ago where the evidence showed they drove usage. A more recent initiative is the IRUS-UK and Repositories project. They are adding value by promoting where citations are and building awareness internationally.

There is a lot going on in North America who are ahead with scholarly publishing in the library. Amherst, University of Huddersfield, Ubiquity Press are just some examples. They have an eye for growing the author pool, particularly with young researchers who may struggle to get published elsewhere. Academic publishing is a professional industry and it has to adapt to changes in scholarly practice.

Follow the ALPSP International Conference conversation on Twitter via #alpsp14.

Is there a role for libraries in open access?

Deborah Shorley, Director of Library Services at Imperial College, provided an illuminating overview of the impact of open access developments on the library at the recent Beyond the Rhetoric: new opportunities in open access seminar. Current challenges for the library community are manifold. There is an evolving role for libraries. Looking ahead, does open access offer a dead end or an open road for libraries?

At Imperial, their collection is 98% digital due to the subjects taught at the university. They unashamedly have very few books left in the collection. They have fantastic feedback in the student survey and from the institution, yet they don't 'own' anything in a traditional sense. Shorley even went so far as to propose that the concept of libraries and collections has gone. A move away from big deals and the demise of print, combined with the development of powerful discovery tools, is shrinking the traditional role of libraries.

With green open access, there is a rise in institutional repositories. This in turn creates a sophisticated metadata demand and the need for expert data management. Shorley pointed out that librarians are quite good at metadata. If they are sensible, they will grasp it, do it better and in new ways. With more journals saying they won't publish unless underlying data is open, there is an opportunity for librarians to help make sense of this.

With gold open access, there may be a role for librarians managing article processing charges (APCs). They are in a good position to give advice to researchers and understand budgetary constraints. At Imperial, they have a small budget - they are going to manage the transitional funding of c.£700k from RCUK - to facilitate the transition.

Is this a role that librarians could adopt in future? At Imperial, they have two people advising the researchers and administering the cash. This is something they are keen to keep: after all, librarians tend to be very good at processes, systems and being honest! Based on these insights, in an open access world, new responsibilities for libraries might focus around advocacy, bibliometrics, and in-house publishing. New skills will be critical to this approach.

For Shorley, the Finch report is fine as far as it goes: it has encouraged librarians to think about things differently, and has spurred RCUK to put its money where its mouth is. But she doesn't see how APCs solve anything. They put the money in the same hands, but in a different place. There must be a different way for universities to invest their money and what they do with how they publish their research.

Shorley closed with a note of caution: in the years of transition, it will be expensive, uncertain, disruptive, but well worth the pain. Science makes things better and this is a better way of doing science. Publishing skills are publishing skills. It's where they sit that's interesting. Whatever happens, they should be used to publish well.

Sarah Price: Library Technology and Metadata - Measuring Impact

The afternoon session at To Measure or Not To Measure: Driving Usage seminar included a session from Sarah Price who is E-Resources and Serials Coordinator at the University of Birmingham and Co-Chair of KBART.

One of key things librarians are interested in is ensuring that the content they buy is easy to use, is discoverable and accessible for their students. She provided a candid and compelling story of how the University had got to grips with critical feedback from students on the eLibrary provision, and how they instigated a major review and development programme to address the issue.

Traditionally, there were two access points to content: traditional library catalogue (mainly for print collections) and the elibrary service. Both were accessed via the home page, but didn't take into account special collections and other services they had. The user interface was very text heavy, old fashioned and not very user friendly and you had to search separately for ejournals and ebooks, making the experience confusing, unattractive and a source of dissatisfaction.

As a results the University has invest in a Resource Discovery Service which provides:

• single search interface and search box (with a Google-like interface)
• harvesting of collections across institutions
• much faster search and results retrieval
• discovery at article and chapter level
• post search filtering and refinement.

The service is publicly available - with no (upfront) authentication - as a taster for potential students and academics. However, if you want to access in-depth content you have to sign-in with your university account. It is designed to have no dead ends and is integrated with other web services such as the University portal. They worked with Ex Libris to develop the product and included embedded searching as a function.

They added the Primo Central Index to this product which is a very important part of the discovery service delivering article level searching. A user can also narrow research from 'everything' to specific collections or using advanced search. You can log in with your own personal account which then provides access to the full set of content and lifts restrictions. When using a search term, the results will indicate what type of resource it is (e.g. articles, books, etc.) Where it is a book, it will show stock and location of copies on a site-specific basis, even including a map of the location in library. Print and electronic resources are listed alongside in a discovery tool. You can see where terms are where you searched to check relevance and you can also facet or post-filter (e.g. by article, book, library site, date range, author, language, electronic database, etc.), and it will attempt to group similar records.

Another interesting feature for scholarly publishers is the link to the in-house reading list management system on each textbook. This is flagged at the foot of the entry and you can click through to see full reading list and then continue through to other titles and services. Crucially, this will be helpful in checking against your records whether an academic has added a title to a reading list or not after receiving an inspection copy.

The resource is embedded on the university portal my.bham within a MyLibrary tab. This is a primary source of driving usage to the site. It's early days for analytics, but at the start of term they have the same amount of traffic from my.bham university portal as from Google Scholar. In addition, index based searching is generating a lot of traffic from their users.

During the implementation they decided to:

• still provide database level link to native interface function
• provide library catalogue only search but within FindIt@BHam
• 'everything' set as search default but enable a limit of scope
• linking SFX component of Metalib library catalogue to reading list management system and the University of Birmingham Research Archive (UBIRA).

They dispensed with the A-Z list and pre-search limiters and now rely on post filtering facets. They also dispensed with ebook MARC records as metadata input and now directly harvest from SFX. It was a bold decision, but they have found that it works for them. There has also been integration of the single search in the portal and library services homepage.

Price flagged the importance of metadata for discovery. It supports linking to the appropriate copy; allows an appropriate set of links to be presented in a single place; allows the library to accurately and comprehensively display an entire portfolio; accurately depicts the entitled coverage for that user; and allows users to find keywords in full text - not just abstracts.

As 'Resource Discovery Service' isn't the most exciting or engaging title, they ran a competition amongst staff for the new brand name. There were 80 suggestions, but the winner - FindIt@Bham - was felt to tie in with the overall university brand well. They thought long and hard about integrating the Birmingham brand and used pictures of the distinctive campus to customise the out of the box product. They have integrated with the University portal VLE and embedded in the library Facebook page. Other marketing and promotion included:

• social media
• lots of work with the Student Guild
• postcards/bookmarks
• university staff and student newsletters
• focus groups, training and briefing sessions
• integration and prominent website advertising
• university-wide plasma screens.

It's early days in terms of measuring impact, but they are assessing reviews of user feedback post-launch and have a continuous improvement strategy and post-launch authority group in place. They will analyse future quality measures, service and resource usage and benefits realisation. They are expecting to see a big hike in full text usage, are anticipating a massive impact to their ratings and anticipate seeing value added throughout the supply chain.

It has been interesting to compare to a Google Scholar set of results for certain specific searches. These only give generic results, not library entitlement. It has been interesting to note that the top result on a title is a pdf from JSTOR of a similar book to the one searched - their system is much more precise.

When addressing concerns about wider access to content, a demonstration showed that while Google will present the results, it won't present the full text unless they are free for access or the viewer can log in with an entitlement through the library system. The system doesn't embed authentication without library intervention - the link resolver.

Already, in comparison with Google Scholar searches, the Library discovery is context sensitive to the definition and results are more focused. Library discovery allows added value with resources grouped by subject and scholarly recommender services.

Her advice to publishers on how to integrate titles into the system includes:

• send your title level metdata to link resolvers (KBART)
• keep it up-to-date (cessations, title changes, etc)
• provide your deep linking algorithm
• allow discovery platforms to harvest your metadata
• don't be exclusive, be promiscuous!
• assess usage patterns following integration.

She concluded by saying that integration with library discovery tools is essential to drive usage. This needs to be based on industry good practice and there is a growing body of evidence supporting usage increase (and decrease) dependent on RDS integration.

ALPSP Conference Day 1: Global Consortia and Library Markets overview

News of the World panel

Thomas Taylor from Dragonfly Information Services provided a packed overview of global consortia and library markets as part of the News of the World session on day one of the conference.

He observed that access to research is becoming a ‘right’. Open Access movement is a disruptive business model and there is an evolution of traditional subscription models for consortia. 

The advantages for publishers include protection for subscription revenue, access and usage explodes, the impact factor goes up and you can integrate Open Access journals into consortia deals.

Global trends in consortia markets include:

• Library budget constraints in all economies – from dire (in Ireland) to selective (China)
• Large national closed consortia with less/no central funding (DFG, NSTL, CRKN, CAPES)
• Mature (penetrated) consortia acquiring less
• Budgets plus time constraints (renewals) (CRKN, China, JISC)
• Newer (less penetrated) consortia proceeding cautiously and in increments (Mexico, Japan)
• Renewals still strong, the default setting
• Consortia as purchasing model still healthy

China

Has a strong economy showing signs of slowing down. There is a commitment to invest in education in short and long term and to indigenous publishing (including journals). Local marketing, sales and brand are a necessity for language, laws, social media (they have their own versions of twitter and google). Consortia had aggressive purchasing until two years ago, but are now more selective and subject area specific. They are showing sign of mature consortia and purchasing has been slowed down by politics and bureaucracy. There are two very well know consortia: NSTL (closed, centrally funded, 600 institutions with 9 member board) and CALIS (open with no central funding, 700 to 1400 institutions).

India

They have a strong economy with no signs of slowing down as well as the third largest HE system in the world. Major investment in recent years appears to be continuing in both new institutions, R&D spending and new consortia. With 10 to 15 major consortia this is still an immature market.

Middle East/North Africa

This is a diverse region with many markets. There has been an economic slow down since 2009. They are thinking about how to invest in post-oil economy, education is one of the key factors. The Arab Spring has created political uncertainty and instability in some countries (but hope as well!). There are immature consortia who are increasing spending on e-journals, databases and ebooks, especially in STM. It is anticipated that 2013-2015 library budgets will be flat or increasing modest.

Europe

Economies continue to be challenged and uncertain. Europe is a diverse market (north vs south?). Library budgets are decreasing or remain flat. Very little new content is being purchased. Renewals of deals still the default in most cases. Main policy impact is through Open Access mandate from EU in support of UK mandates.

UK

The economy is in recession. JISC is one of the oldest and mot mature consortia (Open). There is little acquisition of new content (ISPG purchased this year). Renewals of deals is the default (two big deals renewed last year amid much noise). Government mandated Open Access most aggressive in the world.

Brazil

Strong economy (6^th largest in the world, overtaking Britain). CAPES a national, closed, mature consortium, is one of the oldest. It has deals with most commercial publishers. There are 350 libraries (all of Brazil academic market and then some). The new government has created an uncertain future and there has been very little new content acquisition in last two years.

Mexico

This is a growing economy with an unstable political situation with new government and drug wars. Mexico has a three year old government funded consortium.

Canada

The economy is growing. CRKN is a mature national closed consortium that no longer has government funding, but is funded by member libraries now. Budgets for new content are uncertain. Renewals only in 2012 for 2013. There are regional consortia (four, open) buying some new content, but budgets will continue to be uncertain until CRKN renewals are confirmed.

United States

Elections in US could effect consortia in a big way. If Obama is re-elected he has promised to invest in education and research. EBSCO Community Plus is a new open North American consortium. There are 250+ research libraries and 50 ARL libraries. ISPG and several other content providers are participating with tentative plans to expand into Europe.

In summary:

• Consortia deals continue to be healthy and renewed
• Most consortia adding little new content when compared to the past
• Centrally funded consortia are challenged
• Addendum scientific research is increasingly global
• Implications for libraries, consortia, publishers and purchasing models
• Addendum 2: Open Access mandates and how they affect the consortia world.
• If you are’t a large commercial publishers, join forces with other like minded publishers.