PLOS and LibLynx Partner to Develop Open Access Analytics

The following press release was issued on Wednesday, August 12 at 8am Pacific.

SAN FRANCISCO (August 12, 2020) — The Public Library of Science (PLOS) and LibLynx announced a partnership today to develop ground-breaking analytics that better communicate the usage and impact of Open Access (OA) content.

A critical component in the development of sustainable funding models for OA is the ability to communicate impact in ways that are meaningful to a diverse range of internal and external stakeholders, including institutional partners, funders, and authors.

While traditional paywall publishers can take advantage of industry standard COUNTER reports to communicate usage to subscribing libraries, no similar standard exists for OA content.

“One of the great benefits of our Open Access agreements with institutions is the development of next generation metrics for native-OA content,” said Sara Rouhi, Director of Strategic Partnerships, PLOS. “LibLynx is a crucial collaborator and thought leader in this space and we’re eager to build upon existing COUNTER-compliant metrics and share new approaches to reporting with the broader OA community”

These new approaches will provide stakeholders with reports customized to meet their changing needs and underpin the development of new business models. Reports will be trialed and piloted with the PLOS community over the next 6 to 12 months, contributing to the development of future standards in this area.

“Together LibLynx and PLOS have a unique opportunity to develop new metrics for evaluating open access content — an emerging need for libraries and consortia as they work to evaluate the benefits of transformative and native-open access publishing agreements,” said Tim Lloyd, CEO, LibLynx. “Our depth and breadth of experience in this arena, along with the organizational data available from PSI Metrics, will help provide PLOS and their partners access to real-time, on-demand reporting on the impact of their content.”