Can differences in publisher size account for the relatively low prices of the journals available to master’s universities through commercial publishers’ databases? The importance of price discrimination and substitution effects

Using price quotes and invoices for thousands of full-text databases and single-journal subscriptions, this study confirms that for a typical master’s university, the journals acquired through commercial publishers’ databases cost substantially less than those acquired through the databases of scholarly societies, universities, and other nonprofits. Moreover, the lower prices of commercial publishers’ journals cannot be readily attributed to publisher size (number of journals published) or to any of several other explanatory variables. There is a weak, direct association between publisher size and price among the for-profit journals but a stronger, inverse relationship between publisher size and price among the nonprofit journals. These findings, along with the results of previous research, suggest that resource providers may have incentives to keep prices low due to the collection development strategies adopted by many teaching-oriented colleges and universities. If the library’s goal is to hold a sufficient number of high-quality journals rather than to provide immediate access to every wanted journal, particular journals and databases may be regarded as substitutes even when each product provides unique content. Many U.S. bachelor’s and master’s institutions have goals different from those of the major research universities, and commercial publishers (along with some of the larger nonprofits) seem to recognize this when setting and negotiating prices.

Search Effectiveness in Nonredundant Sequence Databases: Assessments and Solutions

Duplicate sequence records-that is, records having similar or identical sequences-are a challenge in search of biological sequence databases. They significantly increase database search time and can lead to uninformative search results containing similar sequences. Sequence clustering methods have been used to address this issue to group similar sequences into clusters. These clusters form a nonredundant database consisting of representatives (one record per cluster) and members (the remaining records in a cluster). In this approach, for nonredundant database search, users search against representatives first and optionally expand search results by exploring member records from matching clusters. Existing studies used Precision and Recall to assess the search effectiveness of nonredundant databases. However, the use of Precision and Recall does not model user behavior in practice and thus may not reflect practical search effectiveness. In this study, we first propose innovative evaluation metrics to measure search effectiveness. The findings are that (1) the Precision of expanded sets is consistently lower than that of representatives, with a decrease up to 7% at top ranks; and (2) Recall is uninformative because, for most queries, expanded sets return more records than does search of the original unclustered databases. Motivated by these findings, we propose a solution that returns a user-specified proportion of top similar records, modeled by a ranking function that aggregates sequence and annotation similarities. In experiments undertaken on UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, the largest expert-curated protein database, we show that our method dramatically reduces the number of returned sequences, increases Precision by 3%, and does not impact effective search time.

Measuring the academic library

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to provide an Australian perspective of impact and value by examining how the broader international and national perspectives play out in practice in the Australian context and where adaption for local requirements is necessary.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper will explore the assessment of impact and value in academic libraries and the tools available to translate today’s inputs into future impact and value. It will focus on a range of methods and procedures, including international and national standards, frameworks and benchmarks.

Findings

The La Trobe University Library is presented as a case study to examine the challenges of leveraging tools to assess impact and communicate the value of the library across the university community.

Originality/value

Assessing the impact and demonstrating the value of the academic library in a digital environment is a constant challenge. While usage and service data are plentiful, traditional metrics no longer sufficiently demonstrate the academic library’s contribution to university learning, teaching and research outcomes.

The impact of better access to scientific journals on the quality of research work: The case of a small university

Linking a publication with scientific research results and the use of information resources is a key component of the collection, development and assessment of an academic library. Librarians often use quantitative data, but it is not easy to come by. Directly connecting library and information services to the impact they have can be quite difficult. Focusing on the 2010–2014 period, we have linked the quality and quantity of published papers to usage statistics for the newly acquired consortia access to scholarly journals in three international publisher databases: ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and WileyOnline. We found that the share of scholarly journals from the ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and WileyOnline consortia cited by University of Primorska researchers’ in their scholarly papers has gradually increased every year, ranging from 13.5% in 2010 up to 24.8% in 2014. The share of scholarly papers published by University of Primorska researchers’ in scholarly journals with the highest impact (measured in Web of Science and Scopus) has also increased substantially, from 18.03% in 2011 to 31.55% in 2014. Study shows that better access to quality information resources for scientific researchers lead to an increase in its use and results in higher quality research shown by the gradual increase of publications of research results in higher impact scholarly journals.