Recalibrating Cost-per-Use: Implications of COUNTER Release 5 and Unsub

Abstract

Calculating the cost-per-use of serials is a common practice in academic libraries, but the accuracy of these calculations requires accurate, comparable usage counts, and shortcomings of previous standards have made obtaining such counts difficult. Librarians may also want to exclude some uses, for example of open access articles, from their cost-per-use calculations, but these uses have often been difficult to identify. This column discusses two recent developments, the adoption of COUNTER Release 5 and the release of an online tool called Unsub, that will lead to improvements in usage counting and a significant readjustment of cost-per-use calculations for many libraries.