[Eril-l] making sense of JR2 turnaway data? esp. T&F?

[Melissa Belvadi]

Hi, all.

We currently don't have any "Big Deal" package with Taylor & Francis and
have only a tiny number (10) of their journals, and so are putting their
JR2 reports under the microscope to see if we can justify a bigger
expenditure.

We're seeing absolutely bizarre anomalies and I'm wondering if anyone else
has seen this kind of thing with either this publisher or even any of the
others, and have any ideas about it.

We're a small, 4000 FTE most undergraduate university in Atlantic Canada.
For calendar 2015, T&F claims we had over 100,000 turnaways across about
2,200 titles.

And the pattern of those is very suspicious on a journal by journal basis.
Almost every journal with significant turnaways has 1/3 or of those in a
single month or almost all of it in just two months, sometimes consecutive
sometimes not.

For instance, a journal with very high turnaways (we do NOT have a library
science program) is "Serials Review" which shows almost 1,400 turnaways for
2015, of which 993 were recorded in August.

And this is turnaway data, not use data. Surely if these were human beings,
they'd give up after a handful of tries realizing that we don't have that
content licensed!

I'm wondering if this is evidence of hacked accounts, and the vendor
doesn't say anything to us because with turnaways, they aren't losing
anything. But even the scripted hacks ought to give up long before they
rack up almost 1,000 failed attempts.

What on earth is going on here?

Thanks for any advice, ideas, pointers, etc.

-- 
Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca 902-566-0581
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