The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

ACALIB-01575; No. of pages: 13; 4C:

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

The Journal of Academic Librarianship

PERSPECTIVES ON…

Implication of 80/20 Rule in Electronic Journal Usage ofUGC-Infonet Consortia

Mangkholien Singson a, Paokholun Hangsing b

a Department of Library & Information Science, Pondicherry University, Kalapet, Puducherry 605014, Indiab Department of Library & Information Science, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya 793022, India

E-mail addresses: manglien.lis@pondiuni.edu.in, manroel.hangsing@gmail.com (P. Hangsing).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.12.0020099-1333/© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Singson,M., & HangAcademic Librarianship (2014), http://dx.doi

a b s t r a c t

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 21 March 2014Accepted 2 December 2014Available online xxxx

Keywords:Pareto 80/20 ruleElectronic journalUsage metricUGC-InfonetINFLIBNET

This study aims to understand the implication of the 80/20 rule in large academic library consortia. INFLIBNETinitiative-UGC-Infonet is the largest academic consortia initiative in Indian higher education that providesservices to 414 institutional members across the country. A total of eighteen publishers and aggregators(N = 6854 journals) from COUNTER usage data for the year 2011 was collected from the INFLIBNET Centre.Cumulative download and cumulative percentage of the journals were calculated from the downloaded countsto generate a Pareto chart usingMicrosoft Excel 2007. The result of the study suggests that the 80/20 rule in largeconsortia is truly, if not precisely in conformity, when consolidated usage of journals across eighteen (18) pub-lishers are put together at 85%/15%. Contrastingly, differences in the result are observedwhen titles are analyzedindividually according to the publishers demonstrating a reverse of the 80/20 principle.

© 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

Libraries today cannot have the luxury of a “go-it-alone” approachand yet satisfy all the electronic resource requests of their clientele.As a result, the 1990s introduced the remarkable formation of libraryconsortia, particularly in the area of collection development and thereby“reaching the unreached”. The progress in the formation of buying clubsenabled overcoming their restricted library budgets and took advantageof the large scale of price savings. Similarly, Landesman and Van Reenan(2000) also advocated consortia formation as a direct result of a library'saspiration to increase the purchasing capacity of the collaboratinglibraries and to expand resource accessibility by offering automatedservices. However, in recent years library consortia negotiationsare often criticized because of “all or nothing” and “monopolistic”approaches (Atten & Sanville, 2004; Frazier, 2001). It is often believedthat a bundled library resources agreement through library consortiaonly results to a monopolistic practice that will remove the librarians'ability to select stronger journals and leave weaker journals aside, andincreases the libraries' dependence on commercial journals as onlya “small number of core journals satisfy the majority of users' needs”(Gerhard, 2005). Librarians are beginning to question the value ofeach title as well as the value of a bundled purchase for mega consortia.Are the purchases really worth it, especially those that are notdownloaded and used at all, yet purchased as a bundle through consor-tia negotiation?Now that the charm and “glamor” of electronic journalsand consortia are fading, greater emphasis is on justifying the usage and

glien@gmail.com (M. Singson),

sing, P., Implication of 80/20 R.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.12.

judicious management of their electronic resource (Stemper &Jaguszewski, 2004). Above all, Chauhan and Mahajan (2014) reportedthat 95 (30.4%) respondents were not at all aware of UGC-Infonetconsortia.

This paper attempts to identify the most frequently used corejournals by the users of the UGC-Infonet consortium in India for theyear 2011. Moreover, this empirical study on adopting a metric in iden-tifying the core collection of the publisher based on usage is significantin justifying the usage of journals by the users in the consortia.

UGC-INFONET CONSORTIA

The idea of INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network) wasconceived in 1988 and implemented by theUGC (University Grant Com-mission, India) in April 1991 (Suku & Pillai, 2005). Eventually, the centerwas recognized as one of the IUC (Autonomous Inter-University Centre)to provide common facilities for research and for various services andprograms to the universities, since heavy investment in infrastructureand input is beyond the reach of the individual university to obtainthese facilities. Subsequently, the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortiumwas initiated by INFLIBNET in 2004 to enable “deemed” and centraluniversities' free access to 5000 full-text electronic resources subscribedby the consortia unlike many other consortia that require pulling infinancial commitment. The entire subscription cost is paid to thepublisher by INFLIBNET as agreed in a deal finalized by the NationalSteering Committee (NSC) (Chand&Arora, 2008). Themembership is in-creasing from50members in thefirst phase to 167Universities currently,and providing differential access to subscribed e-resources including allthe IUCs of the UGC.

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2 M. Singson, P. Hangsing / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

LITERATURE REVIEW

PARETO 80/20 RULE

Literature on electronic journal usage in a consortia environment isever growing. The fact that retention and cancellation decisions havealways been a challenge for a librarianmust be considered, as tradition-ally journal use statistics have always been adopted by libraries in de-ciding which journals to cancel and which to retain (Rathemacher,2010). The problem is further aggravated in large geographical consor-tia as there is often a discourse of opinion on consortia agreement.According to Verhagen (2007), consortia agreement may sometimesoffer a greater benefit in the case of a larger institutionwith a larger geo-graphical coverage. However others disagree on consortia agreement.Harwood and Prior (2008) report of a study into journals businessmodels in United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee(JISC) composed of five publishers which identified the feasibilitystudy of a “big deal” over a pay-per-view model. The findings suggestthat pay-per-view turns out to be expensive and difficult to budget un-like the “big deal”model. Thefindings also depict that highmaintenancecost is involved in monitoring the usage statistics. Therefore identifyinga metric to identify the core journal is a challenge librarians experienceon their routine work—be it acquisition, collection management orcirculation.

The 80/20 rule is a well known classical economic theory that has itsimplication in a diverse discipline including Library and InformationScience. Though controversial this theory is attributed to VilfredoPareto. Pareto reported that 80% of the wealth in Italy was owned by20% of the families which eventually received much attention in the1930s. Later, after Pareto's death, there was a “revival” of his workfrom different disciplines (Nisonger, 2008). Accordingly, the 80/20 pat-tern is often called Pareto distribution or the Pareto Principle (Nisonger,2008). The Pareto theory is based on the idea that 80% of the effectscome from 20% of the causes (Schöpfel & Leduc, 2012). This phenome-non is alternatively referred to as “the Law of the Vital Few and theTrivial Many,” a term coined by the management expert Joseph M.Juran. Application of the Pareto theory is predominant in businessmanagement practice, which would assume, for instance, that 80% ofbusiness profits are drawn from 20% of the customers. Atkinson(1992) recommends the application of the 80/20 principle inInformation System strategic planning where 20% of the effort wouldproduce 80% gain. In a librarian's perspective, the Pareto rule is wellaccepted and applied in various research works previously conducted.Trueswell (1969) an industrial engineer, Nisonger (2008), Burrell(1985), Egghe (1986) and Tonta and Ünal (2008) have previouslydiscussed the application of the 80/20 rule in libraries. According toTrueswell (1969), approximately 80% of the use of library books andserials were derived from 20% of the library collection. Drawing muchcriticism on the Pareto rule, Nisonger (2008) states that, “factors suchas collection size, level of use, or method of calculating use may influ-ence the results,” which he further states that “numbers do not workout precisely and sometimes they are widely off the mark.” In a recentwork on consortia use on Academic Press IDEAL, Davis (2002) foundthat 24.3% of the titles satisfy 80% of the use. Emrani, Moradi-Salari,and Jamali (2010) report on the analysis of COUNTER-compliant usagedata of Elsevier Science Direct journals for the period of 2004–2009 byan Iranian consortium (Consiran) and suggest that the “80/20 rule” orthe Pareto principle is evident from the usage of the journals from thefifty-eight institutions.

An alternative to the 80/20 theory resulted into “Long Tail.” The term“Long Tail”was first coined and proposed by Chris Anderson in the year2004 in a “Wired” magazine. Anderson (2004) explains:

“Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top ofthe charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of nichemarkets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”

Please cite this article as: Singson,M., & Hangsing, P., Implication of 80/20 RAcademic Librarianship (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.12.

Chris Anderson's new alternative to a business model is primarilybased on niche strategy, “selling less from more” (Anderson, 2006).Similarly, the work of Gould (2009) and Schöpfel and Leduc (2012)also reflects the practicality of “long tail” in Library collection develop-ment. They demonstrated the real time phenomenon of “Longtail”over the Pareto 80/20 rule by comparing individual subscription ofjournals over bundled purchase of journals in a package, also knownas “big deal” coined by Frazier (2001) in the D-Lib Magazine article,“The Librarians' Dilemma: Contemplating the Costs of the ‘Big Deal’.”Their findings suggest that usage statistics are influenced and “partlyshaped by the long tail effect.” They also conclude that individualsubscriptions are more selective than the bundle “big deal.”

UGC-INFONET

Ever since the initiation of UGC-Infonet consortia numerous studieshave been conducted on the system effectiveness, electronic journalusage reports, cost benefit analysis and awareness of the resourcesprovided by the consortia. Studies on the use of UGC-Infonet consortiaresource at the institutional level were also reported (Chauhan &Mahajan, 2014; Kumbar & Hadagali, 2009; Madhusudhan, 2008;Singson & Leeladharan, 2010) as well as the cost benefit analysis(Chand & Arora, 2008; Chauhan & Mahajan, 2013). Empirical evidenceon the awareness and use of electronic journals through academicconsortia are growing in India. A case study of awareness and usageof electronic journal in Aligarh Muslim University conducted by Razaand Upadhyay (2006) indicates that 73.07% of respondents useUGC-Infonet consortia for accessing electronic journals. However,Chauhan and Mahajan (2014) reported low awareness of UGC-Infonetamong the social science fraternity.

Looking back at the previous studies, UGC-Infonet consortia's impactcan be seen across the country. But, it is also prudent not to be swayedby the promiseswithout critically evaluating the scope of improvement.Earlier studies based on empirical evidence are observed to stress onthe increasing importance of user awareness and cost benefit byundermining the scope of research in other domains for evaluationsuch as adopting usagemetric, understanding the log files, and compar-ing vendor statistics with institutional customized usage.

METHODOLOGY

Adataset on electronic journal usage data can help inmanaging theirlibraries effectively in several ways (Taylor-Roe & Spencer, 2005). Forthe present study, the INFLIBNET initiated UGC-Infonet consortia wasselected, primarily for being the largest academic consortium servingthe Indian higher education and academic fraternity in a wider spec-trum. The study includes eighteen publishers and aggregators thatdistribute electronic resources to the consortia for the year 2011. Theanalysis of usagewas based on the number of successful full-text articlerequests per month and per journal based on SUSHI-COUNTER compli-ant usage for 2011 provided via site visit and E-mail request from theconsortia administrator in December, 2012. The usage data providedwere COUNTER compliant except for Oxford University Press and consistof non-subscribed journal usage that is not a part of the consortiapurchase.

Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources(COUNTER) is a multi-agency project, developed to address the issuepertaining to the Code of Practice for usage reports that specifies “thedata elements to be measured; definitions of these data elements;usage report content, format, frequency and methods of delivery;protocols for combining usage reports from direct use and from usevia intermediaries” (Project COUNTER, 2002; Stemper & Jaguszewski,2004). More recently, COUNTER has released the COUNTER Code ofPractice for e-Resources: Release 4 on April 2012, which is an upgradefrom the previous release 3 (see http://www.projectcounter.org).

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Table 1Total number of publisher's journal contribution in UGC-Infonet consortia

Sl. No. Publisher No. of

journal

(N = 6854)

Percentage Downloads

1 JSTOR 1401 20.44% 2,392,635

2 Springer Link 1390 20.28% 1,590,842

3 Taylor and Francis 1129 16.47% 208,793

4 Science Direct 1010 14.74% 2,084,333

5 John Wiley 896 13.07% 1,311,667

6 Project Muse 410 5.98% 91,426

7 Oxford University Press 207 3.02% 187,143

8 Cambridge University Press 195 2.85% 75,096

9 American Chemical Society 37 0.54% 1,534,749

10 Project Euclid 35 0.51% 2953

11 Annual Reviews 33 0.48% 72,743

12 Emerald 28 0.41% 75,491

13 Royal Society of Chemistry 26 0.38% 330,985

14 American Institute of Physics 23 0.34% 463,456

16 SIAM 14 0.20% 5465

15 American Physical Society 10 0.15% 212,643

17 Portland Press 9 0.13% 6140

18 Nature 1 0.01% 122,621

Total 6854 100% 8,376,546

3M. Singson, P. Hangsing / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

Since COUNTER usage report consolidates all the journals of anindividual institution member through their registered institutional IPaddresses, and reports of journals that are not subscribed by the consor-tia but by the individual consortiamembers are also reported. Thereforea non-subscribed journal individually subscribed by the institution isfiltered out for accuracy in data interpretation and tabulated in aMicrosoft Excel 2007 work sheet. Microsoft Excel 2007 is bundledalong with Microsoft Office 2007 and is widely used by scientists fordata collection, calculation, and analysis (Zhang, Huo, Zhou, and Xie,2010). A higher resolution for visualization enables the readers to real-ize the impact of the results presented in the form of graphs. Moreover,the integration of Microsoft Word 2007 in making the graph inMS-Excel itself is an added advantage.

The process is followed by shortening the total journal downloadin descending order. Hence, publishers' cumulative download and

0

50000

100000

150000

200000

250000

300000

Dow

nloa

ds

Months

Fig. 1.Monthly downloa

Please cite this article as: Singson,M., & Hangsing, P., Implication of 80/20 RAcademic Librarianship (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.12.

cumulative percentage are calculated from the downloaded counts togenerate a Pareto chart. The same process is followed to all thepublishers collectively and individually (see Fig. 3 and Appendix 1).

A five month usage report from Taylor and Francis is not availableand no justification from the administrator was reported.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

TOTAL NUMBERS OF JOURNALS IN PUBLISHER'S BUNDLE OF ELECTRONICJOURNAL IN UGC-INFONET CONSORTIA

Table 1 shows the percentage of each publisher's journal contribu-tion in the consortia. The breakup of 6854 journals suggests differencesin their bundle; JSTOR which is an archival initiative providing onlineaccess to back run volumes of journals mostly identified as a “movingwall” system, where only issues older than three to five years are acces-sible contributes 20.44% of the journal collection at 1401 journals and2,392,635 downloads, followed by commercial publisher's SpringerLink (1390), Taylor and Francis (1129), Science Direct (1010) and JohnWiley (896). A significant cost recovery according to INFLIBNET-Annual Report 2011 also suggests that JSTOR is the highest followedby the Springer & American Chemical Society (ACS) (INFLIBNET,2011). These publishers have more titles in their bundle and are thedominant aggregators/publishers in the consortia. JSTOR moving wall isthe time period between the earliest accessible issue and the most re-cently published issue of a journal. The accessible period in the “movingwall” scheme keeps moving as new publications are added in five.Springer Link, on the other hand, is a for profit STM (Scientific, Technicaland Medical) publishing house. Similarly, Science Direct is also a forprofit organization and a license agreement can be individually tailoredto meet the needs of the participating universities and consortia oflibraries as surcharges of 15% that makes it an attractive avenue(Dirkmaat & Kohn, 2002). Whereas, the bottom five are aggregatorsand publishers of society in business model. They are the Royal Societyof Chemistry (0.38%), American Institute of Physics (0.34%), SIAM(0.20%), American Physical Society (0.15%) and Portland Press (0.13%).

UGC-INFONET DOWNLOADS STATISTIC

There is a significant variation in the download of journals acrosspublishers. Fig. 1 is a visual representation of UGC-Infonet downloadsof publishers, for which, downloads are seen to be maximum for

AIPAPSAnnual ReviewsCambridge University PressNatureOxford university Pressportland PressProject MUSERoyal Society of ChemistryScience DirectSpringer LinkEmeraldTaylor and FrancisSIAMJSTORJohn Wiley and SonsProject EuclidAmerican Chemical Society

ds of UGC-Infonet.

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801444 832447

951247887050 849003

771123

916162 9536291028265

819322

951902

837195

0

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400000

600000

800000

1000000

1200000

Jan 11 Feb 11 Mar 11 April 11 May 11 June 11 July 11 Aug 11 Sep 11 Oct 11 Nov 11 Dec 11

Dow

nloa

ds

Monthly

Fig. 2. UGC-Infonet electronic journal downloads for 2011.

Table 2Publisher wise 80/20 rule in UGC-Infonet consortia

Sl. No. Publisher Percentage % 80/20

1 American Institute of Physics 80/13 Yes

2 Science Direct 80/16 Yes

3 Springer Link 80/25 Yes

4 Oxford University Press 80/21 Yes

5 Taylor And Francis 80/24 Yes

6 John Wiley And Sons 80/19 Yes

7 JSTOR 80/28 Yes

8 Annual Reviews 80/58 No

9 American Physical Society 80/33 No

10 Cambridge University Press 80/37 No

11 Nature – No

4 M. Singson, P. Hangsing / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

publishers whose collection of journals in a bundle contains more.Publishers such as JSTOR (2,392,635), Science Direct (2,084,333),Springer Link (1,590,842), Royal Society of Chemistry (1,534,749)and Wiley (1,311,667) demonstrated downloads above 100,000.Contrastingly, larger bundle publishers like Taylor and Francis cannotbe summarized due to lack of download data for five months. The max-imum downloads are in the range of 100,000 to 250,000 downloads,whereas, publishers such as Project Euclid (2953 downloads), SIAM(5465 downloads) and Portland Press (6140 downloads) are below50,000. One of the factors contributing to lower downloads is theprivilege across members. Institutional members of UGC-Infonet arecategorized into four phases and accesses to contents are regulatedbased on the INFLIBNET policy. One of the criteria followed byINFLIBNET is the FTE (Full Time equivalent).

Though, all the journals are not accessible in the university throughUGC-Infonet consortia, initiation such a JCCC (J-Gate CustomContent forConsortia) enabled users to request articles that are not accessible in theuniversity. J-Gate Custom Content Consortium (JCCC) provides articlesfrom journals subscribed to by the UGC-INFONET Digital LibraryConsortium as well as journals subscribed to by 22 university librariesdesignated as document supply centers by INFLIBNET. The study impliesthat there is an intensivemove toward adopting consortia as ameans tofacilitate scholarly literature. The 22 universities responsible for thedocument supply centers by INFLIBNET provide articles from journalsthat are only available in their collection, while the INFLIBNETis responsible for delivering articles from journals subscribed toby the consortium. The universities recognized are: 1) AnnamalaiUniversity, 2) Assam University, 3) Banaras Hindu University,4) Banasthali Vidyapith, 5) Bangalore University, 6) University ofCalcutta, 7) University of Delhi, 8) University of Hyderabad, 9) JadavpurUniversity, 10) Jawaharlal Nehru University, 11) KurukshetraUniversity, 12) University of Madras, 13) MS University, Baroda,14) Nagpur University, 15) North Eastern Hill University, 16) PanjabUniversity, 17) Pondicherry University, 18) University of Pune,19) Punjabi University, 20) University of Rajasthan, 21) PanditRavishankar Shukla University, and 22) Tata Institute of Social Sciences(Desale, Londhe, & Patil, 2009).

12 Portland Press 80/33 No

13 Project MUSE 80/65 No

14 Royal Society of Chemistry 80/35 No

15 Emerald 80/46 No

16 Siam 80/64 No

17 Project Euclid 80/57 No

18 American Chemical Society 80/43 No

CONSORTIA CONSOLIDATED MONTHLY WISE DOWNLOADS

As shown in Fig. 2 the download behavior of the users are inconsis-tent. Peak academic sessions are observed to be the active months fordownloads. It is observed that in a calendar year, March, July, August,September and November are the active months for downloads and

Please cite this article as: Singson,M., & Hangsing, P., Implication of 80/20 RAcademic Librarianship (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.12.

there is a gradual decrease with the end of the semester session. Indiabeing a large country is blessed with diversity. A study on the factorscontributing to the high and low usages could be an interesting areaof research with a large demography. INFLIBNET UGC-Infonet has414 members participating in the consortia across the country with adistinctive academic calendar.

PARETO 80/20 DISTRIBUTION IN UGC-INFONET

As anticipated, differences on the 80/20 pattern have been observedor alleged in the use of various types of e-resources in the consortiaenvironment. Table 2 shows that the percentage of journals that con-tribute 80% downloads in a given bundle of a publisher's package. Inorder to identify the core journal, the 80/20 principle is applied to allthe participating publishers in the consortia. Thus, the process involvescollecting the journal download statistic and identifying the 20% ofjournals that accounts to 80% of the downloads. Previous studies onelectronic resource usage have been reported at an individual levelwith the lack of a comparative and metric study. Similarly, there is no

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Table 3Core journals in UGC-Infonet

Sl. No Publishers Total numberof journal

% Corejournals

Corejournals

80/20

1 Nature 1 – – No2 Project MUSE 410 65% 144 No3 SIAM 14 64% 8 No4 Annual Reviews 33 58% 19 No5 Project Euclid 35 57% 20 No6 Emerald 28 46% 13 No7 American Chemical Society 37 43% 16 No8 Cambridge University Press 195 37% 72 No9 Royal Society of Chemistry 26 35% 7 No10 American Institute of Physics 23 33% 3 No11 Portland Press 9 33% 3 No12 JSTOR 1401 28% 399 Yes13 Springer Link 1390 25% 345 Yes14 Taylor &Francis 1129 24% 276 Yes15 Oxford University Press 207 21% 44 Yes16 Science Direct 1010 16% 161 Yes17 American Institute of Physics 23 13% 4 Yes18 John Wiley 896 19% 167 Yes

5M. Singson, P. Hangsing / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

extensive evidence of previous research of the 80/20 rule in Indianconsortia. A few researchers found differences in the distribution ofcore collection in their findings. In an editorial column of the “Cortex”journal, Buchtel and Sergio (2006) study the application of the 80/20rule in a citation analysis of the 18 most highly cited Cortex articlesfrom the 89 citable articles published in 2003 and 2004 “Cortex”journals and reported a lower value (70.8%) but close to 80%. However,Nisonger's (2008) findings on 19 studies published from 1964 to 2002suggest a higher concentration of core journals than the 80/20 rule.The findings also reported that “…at least 30% of titles in electronicdatabases were needed to produce about 80% of usage.” Thus, the80/20 ratio does not work out precisely but it can be stated that 30%contributed 80% of the use.

Similarly, the result of the 80/20 rule in UGC-Infonet indicatesthat Science Direct, Springer Link, Taylor and Francis, John Wiley andSons, JSTOR, Oxford University Press and American Institute of Physicswith a large collection of journals in their bundle suggest affinity

Fig. 3. Consolidated Pareto graph of UG

Please cite this article as: Singson,M., & Hangsing, P., Implication of 80/20 RAcademic Librarianship (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.12.

toward the 80/20 distribution pattern. Publishers close to the Pareto80/20 rule are American Institute of Physics (80/13), John Wiley andSons (80/19), Science Direct (80/16), Springer Link (80/25), OxfordUniversity Press (80/21), Taylor and Francis (80/24), and JSTOR (72/28). Correspondingly, publishers that do not show any sign of the80/20 rule are Nature (with just one journal it cannot be accountablefor the analysis), American Physical Society (80/33), Portland Press(80/33), Cambridge University Press (80/37), American Chemical Soci-ety (80/43), Royal Society of Chemistry (80/35), and Emerald (80/46),while the reverse result of the 80/20 rule is seen in Project Euclid (80/57), Annual Reviews (80/58), SIAM (80/64) and Project MUSE (80/65).None of the publishers' usage falls precisely according to the 80/20rule.

Therefore, the findings suggest that 80/20 rule in INFLIBNET consor-tia do comply to publishers with larger number of journals in theircollection. Contrastingly, consolidated downloads of all the publishersdid follow 80/20 rule (see Table 3). This could be due to the fact thatmass bundling as per publishers terms are accepted at the time of nego-tiating the subscription price.

Fig. 3 represent Pareto 80/20 graph of consortia cumulativedownloads.

The result shows 1027 (15%) journals contributing to the core collec-tion with 80% of the downloads within the consortia when the pub-lishers' journal downloads are put together, whereas, the remaining5827 (85%) journals from a total of 6854 journals constitute themoder-ately downloaded or contributes to 20% of the downloads. Therefore,consolidated UGC-Infonet consortia usage is 85/15 which is very closeto the Pareto rule of 80/20. Similar findings were also observe in Tontaand Ünal's (2005) study, who investigated document delivery requestsfilled by the Turkish Academic Network and Information Center fromJune 2000 through June 2002 and indicated that 80.3% of the total num-ber of document delivery requests accounted for only 21.4% of alljournals.

NUMBER OF CORE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL IN UGC-INFONET CONSORTIA

The 80/20 rule is largely adopted to identify the core collection ofjournals within the bundle. According to Intner (1993), “…core collec-tions are the nucleus of needed materials no self-respecting library

C-Infonet consortia journal usage.

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0

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400399

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167 161144

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Fig. 4. Number of core journal in a publisher bundle in UGC-Infonet.

6 M. Singson, P. Hangsing / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

would be willing to do without—the 20% of existing information stockthat satisfies 80% (or more) of users' request…”. Furthermore, Waugh(2004) explain core journals to be the most productive 20% of titles, orthe titles that produce 80% of use.

Table 3 depicts core journals from different publishers in UGC-Infonet. Numerous studies have reported usage patterns in electronicdatabases licensed by libraries or consortia (Nisonger, 2008). Publisherssuch as American Chemical Society (43 core journals), Project MUSE(57 core journals), Portland Press (33 core journals), Royal Societyof Chemistry (35 core journals), Emerald (46 core journals), SIAM(57 core journals), Project Euclid (57 core journals) and Annual Reviews(58 core journals) are observed to contribute a larger number of corejournals based on downloads.

Fig. 4 shows that based on usage, JSTOR contributed the highestnumber of core collection in UGC-Infonet with 399 journals, followedby Springer Link (345 journals), Taylor and Francis (276 journals), John

APPENDIX 1

American Chemical Society

Please cite this article as: Singson,M., & Hangsing, P., Implication of 80/20 RAcademic Librarianship (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.12.

Wiley and Sons (167 journals), Science Direct (161 journals) and ProjectMUSE (144 journals). The larger the collection of journals in the bundlethe higher the collection of core journals.

CONCLUSIONS

The 80/20 rule may be criticized for precision, sometimes indicatinga pattern that is widely off the mark (Nisonger, 2008). Even Trueswell(1969) recognizes that, “…the rule is sometimes expressed as the75/25 rule with the same interpretation”. Yet, the 80/20 rule applicationin large consortia such as UGC-Infonet does portray the user's behaviorandmay be oneparameter for consortial price negotiation. The relevanceis more in a larger consortia model with diverse users and institutionsgeographically spread across a sub-continent. The implication of the80/20 rule among the publishers varies; the larger the number ofjournals in a publisher's collection, the higher is the inclination towardthe 80/20 rule. Publishers with a lesser number of journals in theirpackage suggest a reverse of the 80/20 rule. Subsequently, consortiadownloads collectively indicate an inclination toward the 80/20 rule,one of the factors being institutional level access privilege to the numberof journals across the collection.

There is no doubt that electronic resources provided by the con-sortia reach out to the academia at large, but it is also prudenton the part of the administrators to justify the purchase throughusage statistics for cost-effectiveness of journals at the institutionallevel. Therefore adopting a standard metrics for selection and de-selection would prove fruitful in journal acquisition. Moreover,implementing policy on maintaining local usage metric at an institu-tional level would supplement in justifying the authenticity of avendor's statistic.

Finally, it would be sensible on the part of the policy makers like theINFLIBNET to take subscription decisions on the basis of usage metrics.Such practices would allow the subscriptions to become more cost ef-fective for the exchequer and cater to the needs of the end users. Forthe sake of parity, it is desirable that usage metrics are also maintainedat the participating institutions' end.

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American Institute of Physics

American Physical Society

Annual Review

7M. Singson, P. Hangsing / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

Please cite this article as: Singson,M., & Hangsing, P., Implication of 80/20 Rule in Electronic Journal Usage of UGC-Infonet Consortia, The Journal ofAcademic Librarianship (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2014.12.002

Emerald

Cambridge University Press

8 M. Singson, P. Hangsing / The Journal of Academic Librarianship xxx (2014) xxx–xxx

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