The burgeoning availability of reliable usage data for online journals, through the use of COUNTER reports, has opened the door to usage-based measures of impact, value and status. Impact Factors, based on citation data, have become generally accepted as a valid measure of the impact and status of scholarly journals and are widely used by publishers, authors, funding agencies and librarians. However, there are misgivings about an over-reliance on Impact Factor alone. Online availability of content, combined with the availability of reliable COUNTER-compliant online usage statistics, raises the possibility of a parallel usagebased measure of journal performance becoming a viable additional metric – the Usage Factor for journals. This talk will review the research undertaken to date and will outline the next steps for implementing the Usage Factor.
JAYNE MARKS has spent her career working in journal publishing. Starting as a copy editor for Butterworth Heinemann working in chemical engineering publishing, she then joined Macmillan. During her time there Jayne ran medical journals for Stockton Press and was then a founding board member of Nature Publishing Group where she ran Nature Research, Nature Reviews and society publications. She then set up MPS Technologies, a publishing technology arm of Macmillan India. After spending five years at SAGE running around 350 journals out of California, she recently joined Wolters Kluwer Health to run the Lippincott Williams and Wilkins journals in medicine, nursing and allied health. Throughout her career she has taken particular interest in the development of online publishing and tweets on publishing @jaynedmarks. In 2011 Jayne was appointed the co-chair of the Usage Factor project.
