Feature: Metrics
More than just subscription metrics
Twenty years after its launch, the latest update to the COUNTER Code of Practice is about to go live. Research Information speaks to some of its volunteers
Why do we need a standard for measuring usage? Jo Lambert/Paul Needham, Jisc: Libraries (and other e-resource content consumers) are spending a significant proportion of their budgets on e-resources and need content and collections that meet user needs and represent a good return on investment. Robust and credible data is needed to assess value and impact and ensure that resources are being deployed appropriately. Without a standardised approach to measuring usage, statistics are at best meaningless and at worst completely misleading. The COUNTER standard provides the global de facto standard in measuring usage of e-resources.
Oliver Pesch, EBSCO: Before collections became predominantly online, the library was responsible for hosting and circulating the collection and thus was able to gather its own usage data from its internal systems. Today, however, a typical academic library collection is hosted on and accessed from hundreds of different sites. The need for statistics to manage purchases/licences and support collection development has never been stronger. Without a code of practice like COUNTER, librarians would have the impossible task of gathering and normalising thousands of usage reports each year, and even then, lack of consistency in metrics and reporting would render the results suspect if not useless. Standards are the only way.
Jack Ochs, American Chemical Society: Today’s digital libraries invest considerable resources in licensing and providing access to different types of online content. To make acquisition decisions that provide the highest-quality and most relevant
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resources for the research communities they serve, it is important that they understand how that content is being used. Prior to the formation of COUNTER, usage statistics suffered from a variety of concerning issues including a lack of common report formats, terminology, and definitions; unaddressed technical issues in data gathering; lack of coordination between the different attempts at standardisation, and national, as opposed to international, focus. COUNTER has effectively addressed those issues by ensuring that publishers and other vendors are able to provide usage data to library customers in a format they want; compare the relative usage of different delivery channels; aggregate data for customers using multiple delivery channels; and learn more about genuine usage patterns.
What value does COUNTER bring to the community, and do libraries and publishers view it differently? Heather Staines, DeltaThink: I first learned about COUNTER when I was the eProduct Manager for SpringerLink. I found it so helpful that there was an agreed, standard way to measure usage with clearly defined rules. Internally, publishers look to usage to support renewals and measure researcher engagement across product lines or subject areas. Libraries manage a complex set of resources and enabling them to compare apples to oranges makes that part of their job a bit simpler.
Ochs: COUNTER enables libraries to receive consistent, comparable and credible usage data for the online content they acquire. This allows librarians and other interested parties to compare the usage data they receive and understand and demonstrate the value of the electronic
resources to which they subscribe. Libraries and publishers both value COUNTER’s Code of Practice as a reliable measure of value supported by a dedicated multi-stakeholder team working in good faith to understand and meet the evolving needs of digital asset management.
Lambert/Needham: It’s a globally recognised and widely used standard, informed, developed and maintained by the community itself. The standard is widely regarded as mutually beneficial by all stakeholders, including libraries and publishers.
Stuart Maxwell, Scholarly IQ: COUNTER brings together a community of interested parties to come to common agreement on what the industry needs for usage measurement and how this should be delivered. COUNTER tasks working groups of these volunteers to keep the standards up to date with changing requirements and make sure that any updates have consensus across stakeholders. It is driven not solely by libraries or publishers, but by agreement from both, as well as being open for any other participatory group, including service providers and funders.
COUNTER was originally designed for subscription content, but Release 5.1 is ‘optimised for OA’ – what’s changed? Pesch: The early focus on usage statistics was to support purchase and collection management decisions – to support continued renewal of journals, packages or databases. As OA becomes more popular, particularly for hybrid journals where some articles are free-to-read and others require a subscription, knowing how much usage can be attributed to OA content becomes
‘COUNTER enables libraries to receive consistent, comparable and credible usage data’
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