Usage, She Wrote

If you are noticing a different usage pattern this year, you are not alone. I am hearing from librarians that their usage looks different this year, but there is no obvious reason for this change. While our overall submissions are up year-to-date, our global article downloads are 15% lower than the same period last year.

This got us thinking and we put our sleuth hats on. We are not seeing increased denials and we are not hearing from readers that they have access issues. Cloudflare software has been introduced by some hosting platforms, but we are assured this is only blocking suspected ‘bot’ usage and should not be impacting human usage; COUNTER 5.1 reporting was released but this is intended to help libraries better understand their paywalled or free-to-view usage.

There seems to be something else at large that could be causing this impact. Our key suspects at the moment are:

1. As we have more Open Access content, researchers can access this anywhere, so may be bypassing usual library systems and IPs.
2. AI summary tools are leading to ‘Zero-click’ searches, which was not possible before. Content may still be useful and relevant, but some users might be reading the AI summary instead of the full original version. We, like many other Publishers, are seeing GenAI and LLMs growing as a proportion of our site traffic referrers.
3. Google has changed its search algorithms and this is having an impact on all web traffic.

Is the impact a one-off, or will these external factors impact usage data going forward? This is what we will be considering over the next few months. If any fellow sleuths have any new evidence, please get in contact with us.

Image credits:

Angela Lansbury. Photo by Alan Light, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Detective board with photos of suspected criminals, crime scenes and evidence with red threads, selective focus stock photo. By DedMityay, iStock.