Leiden / Boston – 4 April 2012

Brill announces its participation in the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP*), a portal that provides a single point of access for usage statistics, meaning that each University can quickly and easily compare usage across various publishers, years and journals.

Brill is pleased to announce its participation in the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP*), a new service built in response to demand from the UK HE community. At a time of economic constraint, it is essential that libraries can evaluate usage and make a compelling case about the value of journal subscriptions, and COUNTER compliant data is vital in making such a case. However, obtaining and analysing COUNTER compliant data can be extremely labour intensive with each library having to visit each publisher's website and download their COUNTER compliant statistics. They then need to collate the datasets and analyse them.

Last December Brill launched its new platform for e-books and journals (http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com), which provides COUNTER compliant statistics. With the development of this new platform Brill is delighted to be able to contribute to this essential tool for librarians.

The JUSP Portal provides a single point of access for usage statistics, meaning that each University can quickly and easily compare usage across various publishers, years and NESLi journals. This free service provides UK Universities with empirical evidence to inform the management and procurement of e-journals.

The Portal uses the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol to collect the COUNTER compliant statistics, which are then displayed to each institution in an easy to read way. The portal provides tools to aid fast analysis and makes it possible for libraries to compare their usage of different publisher deals, to look at trends over time and to complete their annual SCONUL returns from participating publishers. Institutions will use this information to plan developments in their library systems that will aid resource discovery and increase usage.

About BRILL

Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, BRILL is a leading international academic publisher in the fields of Ancient Near East and Egypt, Middle East and Islamic Studies, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, contemporary History and History of War studies, Biblical and Religious Studies, Slavic Studies, Language & Linguistics, Biology, Human Rights and Public International Law. With offices in Leiden and Boston, BRILL today publishes more than 175 journals and around 600 new books and reference works each year. All publications are available in both print and electronic form. BRILL also markets a large number of research collections and databases with primary source material. The company’s key customers are academic and research institutions, libraries, and scholars. BRILL is a publicly traded company and is listed on Euronext Amsterdam NV. For further information please visit www.brill.nl.

About JUSP

The JUSP service includes JISC Collections, Mimas at the University of Manchester, Evidence Base at Birmingham City University and Cranfield University. For more information about the project please visit the project website *http://jusp.mimas.ac.uk or contact Jo Lambert.

About NESLi2

NESLi is the national initiative for licensing online journals on behalf of the higher and further education and research communities in the UK. NESLi2 was established in 2004 as a successor to earlier consortial initiatives that emerged with the arrival of online journals in the mid-1990s. The content from 17 leading scholarly publishers are covered NESLi2 agreements which typically span 1-3 years in duration and over 7,000 online journals are available to authorised users. Financial savings on the content purchased, as a result of focused negotiations by our staff, amounted to £13.5 million in 2010 and we estimate that NESLi2 has saved the community over £40 million since its inception in 2004. The content itself is made accessible directly from publishers' bespoke web platforms.