Swets snaps up Scholarly Stats

MPS and Swets go Dutch on market development of statistics service for journal information usage

Subscription services company Swets has bought the rights to ScholarlyStats from MPS Technologies. MPS will continue to run ScholarlyStats for Swets, which will promote the service.

David Sommer, commercial director at MPS, said: “As we considered growth plans for the business, we recognised the need to partner with an organisation with a global sales presence and existing relationships in place with thousands of libraries.”
ScholarlyStats is a web-based portal that collects, consolidates and analyses e-journal usage statistics from multiple sources in Counter-compliant format. Usage reports may be viewed and downloaded by libraries.

ScholarlyStats will be aligned with Swets’ Selection Support product to integrate usage data with cost and licence data for Swets customers. MPS will provide all the back-end services to operate ScholarlyStats for Swets.

Sommer said the deal did not mark a move away from the journals market on the part of MPS. “We have been very active with online journals,” he said, “and have created and supported online journal platforms for the likes of Nature as well as publishers outside Macmillan. The underlying ContentStore platform supports books and journals.”

The tie-up will give Swets greater contact with its customer throughout the acquisition lifecycle. “Customers decide what they want and give us a lengthy shopping list and we go away and get it,” Swets CEO Arie Jongejan told IWR. “There is a lot of activity in the middle of the year. ScholarlyStats gives us contact with the customer much earlier.”

Jongejan said customers were most interested in price per usage statistics and Swets would be making that facility available shortly.

Current ScholarlyStats customers will continue to access the service through the same portal and statistics will be reported in the same format.

Jongejan said he was a “full believer in open source” and that ScholarlyStats would remain available for use in other, non-Swets environments.

www.scholarlystats.com