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AIP & APS Launch Usage Statistics Service for Online JournalsMelville, NY, June 1, 2001 - The American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society are pleased to announce the launch of the OJPS Usage Statistics Service. Institutions registered with AIP's Online Journal Publishing Service for online journal access are now able to view usage reports for the AIP and APS online journals to which they subscribe. The Usage Statistics Service was developed with significant input from librarians. It was shown in prototype at the 2000 annual meeting of the Special Libraries Association, and beta-tested at ten university libraries this Spring. Librarians may access this Web-based, password-protected service at their convenience. Reports for each journal include the number of requests for full-text articles, abstracts, tables of contents, home pages, and searches. Librarians may specify the date ranges for their reports; statistics for 2000 and the first portion of 2001 are now available, and additional 2001 data will become available month by month. (AIP and APS have provided a passcode to each subscribing institution that will allow librarians to register online to establish a Usage Statistics Service account. Librarians at subscribing institutions are encouraged to contact their online administrator for details.) "The new OJPS Usage Statistics Service will allow librarians to measure online usage for the journals to which they subscribe," said Dr. Thomas McIlrath, Publisher, American Physical Society. He added, "We're putting a very powerful tool at librarians' disposal that will help them make acquisition decisions with much greater confidence." "We're providing these statistics to satisfy the needs of our customers," said AIP Director of Marketing Douglas LaFrenier. "We caution, however, that there are no industry standards for online usage metrics, and information from different publishers may not be comparable. For example, we know that we undercount online usage because we record online requests only after users have been authenticated by IP address for "subscriber-only" material. These users could freely browse tables of contents, abstracts, home pages, and the like before being authenticated. In addition, we don't count image files at all." The APS archive, PROLA (Physical Review Online Archive), is not currently included in the OJPS Usage Statistics Service. Therefore, downloads of articles from APS journals published more than three years ago are not counted in the statistics. The publisher plans to have PROLA data included in the near future, as one of a number of planned enhancements to the Usage Statistics Service. Initially, usage data is only available for AIP and APS journals. However, other OJPS publishers are invited to participate. The following journals are currently included:
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