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Abstract. The success of an e-commerce site is, in part, related to how easy it is to use. This research investigated whether advanced web metrics, calculated using Google Analytics software, could be used to evaluate the overall usability of e-commerce sites, and also to identify potential usability problem areas. Web metric data are easy to collect but analysis and interpretation are timeconsuming. E-commerce site managers therefore need to be sure that employing web analytics can effectively improve the usability of their websites. The research suggested specific web metrics that are useful for quickly indicating general usability problem areas and specific pages in an e-commerce site that have usability problems. However, what they cannot do is provide in-depth detail about specific problems that might be present on a page.

This is the first of a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC‐funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open‐archiving) which investigated the IPR issues relating to academic author self‐archiving of research papers. It considers the claims for copyright ownership in research papers by universities, academics, and publishers by drawing on the literature, a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publisher copyright transfer agreements. The paper concludes that self‐archiving is not best supported by copyright transfer to publishers. It recommends that universities assert their interest in copyright ownership in the long term, that academics retain rights in the short term, and that publishers consider new ways of protecting the value they add through journal publishing.

This paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving. Journal of Documentation. 59(3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licences. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal licence agreements.

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