Library consortia can play a critical role in enabling libraries to pool their resources and collective purchasing power, but are ignored by traditional open access usage reporting.

There are over 240 library consortia worldwide¹, providing publishers and other service providers with valuable opportunities to centralise the negotiation and provision of services, including access to paid resources and funding for open access content. The COUNTER code of practice recognises this role by enabling usage reports to aggregate up to the consortia level.

However, the role of consortia is absent when it comes to measuring the vast majority of open access (OA) usage. Unless library users pass through access control on their journey to OA content, the usage won’t be attributed to the individual library (consortia member), let alone the consortia. This is a problem for publishers, who want their negotiations with consortia to reflect the benefit of member usage of the publisher’s open access content, such as books and journals.

No more! We’re delighted to announce that consortial reporting can be added to the analytics available to publishers from Touchstone, our unified usage analytics solution delivered in partnership with PSI.

Starting in Q2 2025 with a set of 60 library consortia covering over 2,000 member libraries across 17 countries, the data will ultimately cover 130+ consortia across 60 different countries.

What is Touchstone?

Touchstone powers open and paywalled publishing models by providing publishers with unique, granular insights into their audiences and demonstrating the value of their content. Whether your interest is understanding open access audiences or those denied access to paywalled content, Touchstone offers the insights you need.

OA usage is attributed to libraries based on their registered campus and proxy IP addresses, and then automatically rolled up to consortia based on membership.

Designed for automation and customisation at scale, Touchstone supports a wide variety of interactive and automated workflows, including online, downloadable, and embeddable reports, API interrogation, and bulk exports.

Please contact us if you’d like to see the value that library consortia get from your open access content.

¹https://icolc.net/participating-consortia