Feature: Metrics
‘The standard is widely regarded as mutually beneficial by all stakeholders’
develop and run the JUSP and IRUS services at Jisc, and the COUNTER standard which underpins these products is absolutely essential. As aggregators of usage statistics, JUSP and IRUS are actively using the standard, working at scale with multiple providers of stats. In doing so, we can offer feedback to COUNTER on areas of challenge or inconsistency and provide support to the community on implementation and use. We do encourage others to join COUNTER: a standard needs to be used, so the greater the level of adoption, the greater the value of the standard to all.
more important. Transitional agreements, designed to support institutions as they transition from reader-pay to author-pay models, also fuels the added interest in gathering statistics on OA usage.
Maxwell: Without going into the transition to OA, there is a real need to understand how the transition to OA is working, what makes it work and what is the impact of OA. All these require measurement and reporting, and what more transparent, established method is there other than COUNTER? One of the fundamental changes for Release 5.1 is putting the focus on to the item rather than the title. Once the report is centred on the item this makes reporting available by author, funder, source etc. The same trusted metrics now support OA-centred questions, which would otherwise be lost within an aggregated title-level report. There is still more to be done to identify and agree what usage means to OA, but we should be making sure that industry-led standards are available to support this. It would be a great mistake for OA usage to not be consistent, credible and comparable in the same way.
Lambert/Needham: The scholarly publishing landscape has changed; publishing is increasingly transitioning to OA, there’s more diversity in the publications landscape – including institutional repositories and university presses – and appropriate metrics to evaluate impact in this new landscape are critical.
Staines: The pandemic put quite a spotlight on open content, from both the
www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo
Covid-related content being made open and opening content for students and researchers displaced from campus. What many organisations discovered, however, was that with no registration process there wasn’t a good way to connect usage to institutions, removing a valuable datapoint for libraries and publishers. On the author side, we saw a shift of interest, among social scientists and humanities folks in particular, in ensuring that the populations they study be able to access the resulting research outputs. COUNTER usage is an obvious way to assess that kind of impact.
When did you get involved with COUNTER and why? Would you encourage others to join? Staines: I joined the COUNTER board back in 2016, after following the initiative for some time. The code touches so many parts of our industry and continues to evolve, as interest in and use of content changes over time. I’m now on the executive committee, and I always find the ongoing conversations insightful. I’m certainly an example of how you can contribute even if you aren’t on the very technical end of the spectrum!
Ochs: We have been members of COUNTER since its earliest days because we recognised its potential to provide a useful and much needed service to the communities we serve. We find our COUNTER membership highly valuable.
Lambert/Needham: We’ve been involved with COUNTER for over 10 years. We
Pesch: I have been involved with COUNTER since the beginning. As a content aggregator, EBSCO had been providing usage reports to libraries for a number of years and the need for standardisation across the industry and library groups was readily apparent. COUNTER, which grew out of a publishers and libraries group (PALS), provided the forum for all concerned parties to meet, collaborate and develop a meaningful code of practice on capturing, processing and reporting usage statistics.
What are the timelines for Release 5.1 and what do publishers and libraries need to do to prepare? Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Project Director, COUNTER: We’re asking for publishers to become compliant by January 2025. The changes aren’t as big as the jump between Release 4 and Release 5, which happened back in 2019, so there shouldn’t be as much technical work to do in that compliance window. As well as the code itself, we’ve been
developing a completely new suite of educational materials – friendly guides, videos, and infographics – to help everyone understand the code and how it has changed, and those will be available from our media library in multiple languages. We’ll be continuing to offer practical webinars and conference sessions on using COUNTER reports, and of course your readers can always sign up to our newsletter from
projectcounter.org and get in touch with me if they have any questions!
Spring 2023 Research Information 11
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