The United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG), in association with the online usage metrics organisation COUNTER, is funding a study to explore how online journal usage statistics might form the basis of a new metric of journal quality, the “Usage Factor”. The first stage of this project involved a series of interviews with various stakeholders, and the second, current stage involves a web-based survey designed to obtain the views of many more librarians and authors than was possible for the interview stage.

If you are an author of a publication in any of the Nature or Nature Publishing Group journals, we hope you can spare a few minutes to complete this important survey, which you can do by clicking on this link. The survey aims to:

• Discover what you think about the measures that are currently used to assess the value of scholarly journals (notably impact factors);
• Gauge the potential for usage-based measures;
• Provide an opportunity for you to suggest possible different, additional measures.

See here for the author survey. It will take less than 5 minutes to do; because it is due to close by 30 March (though it may be extended for a few days), please do visit the survey site now if you are interested in contributing your views and experience.