17 March 2025
There are over 240 library consortia worldwide, providing publishers and other service providers with valuable opportunities to centralise the negotiation and provision of services, including access to paid resources and funding for open access content. The COUNTER code of practice recognises this role by enabling usage reports to aggregate up to the consortial level.
However, the role of consortia is absent when it comes to measuring the vast majority of open access (OA) usage. Unless library users pass through access control on their journey to OA content, the usage won’t be attributed to the individual library (consortia member), let alone the consortia. This is a problem for publishers, who want their negotiations with consortia to reflect the benefit of member usage of the publisher’s open access content, such as books and journals.
LibLynx has announced that consortial reporting can be added to the analytics available starting in Q2 to publishers from Touchstone, our unified usage analytics solution delivered in partnership with PSI.
Starting with a set of 60 library consortia covering over 2,000 member libraries across 17 countries, the data will ultimately cover 130+ consortia across 60 different countries.