The Draft Release 2 of the COUNTER Code of Practice, which has been
approved by the COUNTER Executive Committee (which includes
representatives from librarians, publishers and intermediaries) and
made available for comment at www.projectcounter.org, contains an
important statement in Section 4, Usage Reports, according to which

"Vendors must supply all the COUNTER-compliant usage reports relevant to
their online product categories at no additional charge to customers in
order to be designated ‘COUNTER-Compliant."

It does not say "...relevant to any particular online product for which
they wish to claim COUNTER compliance..." So, I cannot believe it is
just pick and choose. Furthermore, a statement that statistics must be
supplied at no additional charge to customers does not make sense, if
the alternative is "or do not distribute them at all".

The statement was not yet included in Release 1 of the Code that is now
in effect. From the development of Project COUNTER, I can understand
why this requirement has been added only now, as some publishers needed
some time to upgrade legacy online products and could not be expected to
accomplish this in one go.

The "product category" (e.g., journals, or a database, provided on a
certain platform, perhaps also bundled together as a service) used as a
term in the statement from the COUNTER Code of Practice cited above is
quite another matter than the specific "plans" (different licensing
schemes, various subject collection bundles, etc.) under which online
products are offered to customers, so I cannot see how a vendor
could claim COUNTER compliance for a product and refuse to offer stats
under certain plans. There is a fundamental difference with a product
or service not providing usage statistics because it is not yet
technically feasible or practical (outdated legacy product lines soon
to be replaced by others, different development time scales for
different product categories like databases vs. journals) and a
discriminative vendor policy to provide usage statistics under certain
licensing schemes but not under others.

Technical provisions alone are worthless if the Code of Practice doesn't
include the commitment of the vendors to provide usage statistics as an
integral part of any license agreement for online products. Therefore
I would prefer to change the wording of section 7.2 Licence agreements
so that vendors are required to include it instead of merely encouraging
customers to ask for it. E.g., it could state

7.2 Licence agreements
Vendors to be designated as COUNTER-compliant are required to include
the following clause in their licence agreements with customers: ...

Alas, one probably has to accept that COUNTER which has been set up to
"facilitate the recording and exchange of online usage statistics" and
"to to provide a single, international, extendible Code of Practice
that allows the usage of online information products and services to
be measured in a credible, consistent and compatible way using vendor-
generated data", cannot enforce agreements between publishers and
library customers and cannot stipulate specific license clauses for
information products.

However, I still suggest that COUNTER compliance should mean more than
just fulfilling specific technical requirements for processes and
statistical reports. After all, this is a "Code of Practice" and that
should pertain not only to technicalities but also to statements of
good practice on a more fundamental level, and in this sense COUNTER
compliance would be seen as a self commitment also to the principle
that all licensing of online products should come with usage statistics.
This should stay true irrespective of whether the customer pays directly
for the online product or indirectly in connection with a print
subscription that is bundled with online access.

But who should take care to ensure that this becomes a reality?

Up to now, it has been mainly library consortia who have been able to
demand the release of usage statistics from publishers for the
information products they collectively purchase. Understandably,
some publishers have been reluctant to release usage statistics in
general and to all customers, out of fear they could be used to select
titles for cancellation. (Although this is rather foolish as libraries
since long have used local circulation and other usage indicators in
the print environment and click-through rates from portals and A-Z
lists in the online environment to make decisions, and will have to
base their decisions upon these inevitably lower local usage counts if
publishers do not provide usage statistics.) But Consortia, in
particular the multi-year "big deals" with their publicity and
impressing growth in usage, gave them the relative security to discover
usage statistics as a marketing instrument. As a result of this stats
are now routinely provided to most libraries within consortia, but
often not beyond such settings although publishers routinely collect
such statistics and use them for their own purposes.

In my view, the experimental phase is over and usage statistics are
becoming a sine qua non for all libraries especially since more and
more are moving to e-only for part of their collection. I believe
that consortia administrators should now start to demand from
publishers that they provide usage statistics under all plans, even
outside of consortial settings. After all, any particular library that
is a consortium member will be a single library on its own in other
contexts. As we are beginning to see that a lot of consortia deals
will serve libraries well in a transition period but are not
necessarily a sustainable model for all future, we'll have to look
for exit strategies. In my view, we also have responsibility for those
of our members that at some point are forced to back out of a
consortium deal. It is not acceptable that they loose not only cross
access but also are no longer provided with usage statistics. Also,
when negotiating a consortium for the first time, the negotiator
should ask for current and past year usage statistics to be provided
to all potential participants, even before entering a formal consortium
agreement. This should be seen as an essential prerequisite for
decision making that must be made available to all libraries in advance.

Within the last 12 months, availability of usage statistics has made
enormous progress, thanks to COUNTER, and especially thanks to the
multi-publisher aggregators, hosts and gateways that have become
COUNTER compliant, like HighWire, ingenta, MetaPress, Extenza,
EBSCO (EBSCOHost) and Swets (SwetsWise). It is a shame that two of
the big players among vendors (Elsevier and Wiley) insist that the
rules do not hold for them and they are free to decide to which
customers they offer statistics and to which not.

I therefore urge the members of COUNTER from the library community
to insist that usage statistics should be made available to all
customers of vendors designated as COUNTER compliant, under all
subscription plans that are offered under the relevant online product
categories for which a vendor claims COUNTER compliancy.

Bernd-Christoph Kämper
Universitätsbibliothek Stuttgart, Holzgartenstr. 16, 70174 Stuttgart
- Fachreferat für Physik / Koordinierung elektronischer Ressourcen -
Postanschrift: Postfach 104941, 70043 Stuttgart,
Tel. ++49 711 121-3510, Fax -3502, E-Mail: [log in to unmask]