Impact of the consumption of electronic contents on research productivity in the universities of Castile and Leon

• The Big Deal model has brought a greater consumption of academic contents.
• The availability of e-resources contributes to a growth in the academic output.
• Usage and value-for-money data are essential for managing and taking decisions.

The aim of this study is to investigate the link between the use of electronic resources and the academic output of researchers in the state universities of Castile and Leon (Spain) in the period 2006 to 2011. An analysis was undertaken of the consumption of contents distributed to the Universities of Burgos, Leon, Salamanca and Valladolid by three multidisciplinary suppliers whose materials are widely used: ScienceDirect, SpringerLink and Wiley. In investigating academic output, the databases Web of Science (WoS) from Thomson Reuters and Scopus from Elsevier were taken into account. The consumption of electronic academic contents at the four universities shows an upward trend over the years considered. There is an undoubted preference for titles distributed by ScienceDirect, striking in all the institutions. The study confirms that academics from the areas of science and technology were the most frequent users. The field of Chemistry registered the highest rates of both consumption and academic production, followed at some distance by publications related to Food Science and Technology, in respect of preferred title use, and by Physics with regard to communication of research results. Many of the journals selected for publications belonged to the suppliers investigated. Nevertheless, the work showed no absolute direct correlation between titles selected for academic publication and titles used from the platforms analyzed.