Why usage is useless

Well, not really. But I hope it got your attention. So has your editor finally flipped and decided to (ab)use the editorial for some crazy musings? Perhaps. But I do believe there are some points to be made. What I’ll do is consider why such a bold and bald statement as this title is indeed ridiculous, but with the odd diversion try to suggest why we also face a problem with this whole topic. This journal is itself testament to the importance of understanding what people do with the scholarly literature. Taking just this year, in the first issue we published a glowing review of Digital Consumers, a compilation of many years’ work coming out of the CIBER organization – all about ‘usage’, as well as an interesting article about how pharmaceutical companies ‘use’ the published literature as key elements in their work; the second issue contained an article on how ‘users’ might or might not find OA articles in hybrid journals, and this current issue contains an article on how ‘users’ interact with a specific database. Again, in this very issue we have two authors, Don King and Carol Tenopir, who are the doyens of studying usage, giving us fascinating insights over the last thirty years or so. Indeed, they were among the first to destroy the myth that most scientific articles were read by, say, only the parents of the authors and the authors themselves (or not even by them, in some cases, to judge from the reluctance of authors to deal with their proofs). And yet the fact that this type of myth existed at all gives a key to the point I wish to make. In any event, be sure that we will continue to publish these kinds of articles, since they can be both interesting and important. So far, then, so silly. So let’s move on to key participants in scholarly publishing.