News Release - 27 August 2008
- Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases now published -
The final version of Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases has now been published on the COUNTER website at http://www.projectcounter.org/code_practice.html. The deadline date for implementation of this Release is 31 August 2009, giving vendors a full year to meet its specifications. After this date only those vendors compliant with Release 3 will be considered COUNTER compliant.
The main objectives of Release 3 are: to improve further the reliability of the COUNTER usage reports by incorporating new protocols designed to mitigate the potentially inflationary effects on usage statistics of federated search engines, internet robots, crawlers, etc; to provide tools that will facilitate the consolidation, management and analysis of the COUNTER usage statistics; to improve the COUNTER usage reports for library consortia; and to improve the reporting of the usage of journal archives.
The key new features in Release 3 are:
- Incorporation of the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol into the COUNTER Code of Practice.
- New reports that enable vendors who provide journal archives as a separate acquisition from the current journals to meet the requirement that the usage of such archives must be reported separately.
- New library consortium usage reports. The advent of the SUSHI protocol greatly facilitates the handling of large volumes of usage data, which is a particular advantage for consortial reporting. For this reason COUNTER has developed two new reports for library consortia that are specified only in XML format.
- A new optional additional report; Journal/Book Report 1: Number of successful full-text item requests by month and title, specified in XML only, will allow vendors that provide online journals and books on the same platform to report usage of both categories of product in a single COUNTER report.
- A new protocol that allows federated searches to be isolated from dedicated searches of single databases or services.
- New protocols that require activity generated by internet robots and crawlers, as well as by LOCKSS and similar caches, to be excluded from the COUNTER reports.
- About COUNTER -
COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) is a multi-agency initiative whose objective is to develop a set of internationally accepted, extendible Codes of Practice that will allow the usage of online information products and services to be measured more consistently. COUNTER is actively supported by the international community of librarians, intermediaries, publishers and vendors, and by their professional organisations. For more information visit http://www.projectcounter.org
For more information, please contact:
Peter Shepherd
Project Director - COUNTER
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