Annual Reviews

The Challenge

Demonstrating the impact of open access publishing

Anonymous access

Users engaging with open content do not need to be authorized and so their organizational affiliation is unknown at the point of access.

Demonstrating value

Transitioning their paywalled journals under their Subscribe to Open (S2O) model requires Annual Reviews to demonstrate the value of public access to current subscribers and potential funders.

Multiple platforms

Their open access audience cuts across both their 51 journals as well as Knowable Magazine.

“Having concrete evidence of where the articles are of interest, rather than relying on assumptions and hunches, supports decision-making across our organization”

– Andrea Lopez, Director of Sales, Partnerships & Initiatives, Annual Reviews

How We Helped

On-demand analytics tailored to their needs

In the first 18 months, we identified over 12,000 unique organisations from 170 countries that accessed open content published by Annual Reviews. As a result, Annual Reviews understand which organisations across the globe are getting value from their open content, and which open content is driving the most engagement.

Our real-time analytics reports also enable Annual Reviews to further drill into their audience by:

Organisation category (e.g. academic, government) and type (e.g. research center, foundation).
Organisational field of interest (e.g. education, health) and more detailed area of interest (e.g. infectious diseases, robotics).

Organisational affiliation and additional metadata is determined by matching the IP address associated with a usage event against registered organisational IP addresses data from our partners, PSI Metrics.

“Dipping in to address a particular topic – usage of the Annual Review of Public Health in city government and Mayor’s office, for example – can become a fascinating (and lengthy) trail of evidence that reveals unsuspected audiences for the articles. This isn’t just casual nerdiness, it provides insights that we can use to improve the content”

– Richard Gallagher, President & Editor-in-Chief, Annual Reviews

The Implementation

A simple approach designed to minimize effort

We automatically generate and update a suite of web-based analytics reports for Annual Reviews on receipt of their monthly usage files.

We provided Annual Reviews with a simple specification for delivering usage that was tailored to identify the publication type (journal vs magazine) and journal series associated with usage. Usage files take minutes for Annual Reviews to generate, based on the logs provided by their publishing platform, and are delivered monthly to LibLynx as a .csv file via secure upload.

After processing, detailed analytics reports are available to Annual Reviews via a branded web portal and can be shared with external stakeholders as needed in a variety of formats (html, xls, pdf).

We also ingested and processed historical usage data to provide a full set of usage data covering January 2022 onwards.

About Annual Reviews

Founded in 1932, Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. Annual Reviews saves time by synthesizing the vast amount of primary research literature and identifying the principal contributions in a broad range of disciplines within the Biomedical, Life, Physical, and Social Sciences, including Economics. Annual Review articles hold a unique place in the scholarly communication ecosystem because they transfer expert knowledge synthesized from the expanding corpus of scientific literature and they readily accept the challenge to help shape and define their field as a service to scholars and society. Annual Reviews publications are among the highest cited publications by impact factor according to the Journal Citation Reports® published by Clarivate.

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