Publishers provide usage statistics using many different metrics, such as “page views”, “article downloads”, etc. Without knowing exactly how each of these metrics is defined (either in the COUNTER standard or outside of it for custom data), understanding these statistics can be challenging for users.
In order to simplify this and give users one specific measurement of how much each e-resource is used, we devised the concept of Interest. This allows for easier comparison of values across different titles, platforms, and time periods, and also facilitates comparisons between data obtained using various versions of COUNTER..
Because different platforms focus on different types of services, the definition of Interest varies accordingly. Some platforms offer searching capabilities, some offer full texts of journal articles, or access to whole electronic books. In order to make it possible to distinguish between these cases, CELUS uses more than one Interest type.
When creating CELUS, we saw two basic types of services that e-resource platforms offer - access to full texts and database searching. Therefore, we made it possible to use different types of Interest for these services and created the Full text and Search types of Interest. This allows for easy distinction between platform types and, for platforms that offer both services (e.g. EBSCO), a simple comparison between the two. In CELUS version 5.4.0, we introduced another type of Interest - Multimedia, which allows users to easily access the usage of multimedia resources (videos, sound, images, etc.).
Another important aspect of Interest is that it captures both successful and denied access to e-resources. In order to incorporate this into CELUS in a way that would not cause confusion (as could happen if the two types of Interest were simply mixed together), we also created a corresponding types of Interest called Denial - full text and Denial - search. These represent denial data related to the previously mentioned types of Interest, which are used only for successful access to a resource.
For platforms that fall outside of the scope of full text, search and multimedia, there is also the type of Interest Other, used in specific cases e.g. “Topic Hits”, “Checkouts”, “Pages” etc.
The menu Interest overview in CELUS shows an overview with the metrics of the individual report, which define the Interest for that particular report. If a report does not have a metric assigned, no Interest will be computed from the usage data.
For usage reporting in COUNTER standard 5.0 and 5.1, the following definition of Interest and particular COUNTER report is assigned (for the main reports):
