One of the biggest challenges of moving to an open access publishing model is understanding your audience. Without any access control, all that most publishers know about engagement is simply the number of downloads or page views. Which can be a pretty meaningless number once you factor in bots, spiders and other automated access.

Annual Reviews faced this challenge in transitioning their paywalled journals to a Subscribe to Open (S2O) model. S2O requires Annual Reviews to demonstrate the value of public access to current subscribers and potential funders. But their open access audience was unknown, and spread across 51 different journals as well as Knowable Magazine. And aggregate numbers alone can’t tell a compelling story about engagement and impact.

In the first 18 months, our analytics enabled Annual Reviews to identify over 12,000 unique organisations from 170 countries that accessed their open content.

“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

Annual Reviews understand which organisations across the globe are getting value from their open content, and which open content is driving the most engagement. Built in partnership with PSI Metrics, 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).

The result is insightful, on-demand analytics to power open access business models.

“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

To learn more about how LibLynx can help your organisation understand user behaviour, please contact us, or read our case study on Annual Reviews.