COUNTERCounting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources

Member Bulletin

March 2008

  1. EDITORIAL

COUNTER continues to make good progress and there are three major developments involving COUNTER that I want to tell you more about in this Bulletin.

First, the Draft Release 3 of the Code of Practice for Journals and Databases has been published on the COUNTER website and will be available there for comment until 31 May 2008. This draft has been developed with input from the publisher and librarian communities and we welcome further feedback on it. The main features of Release 3 are described below.

Second, the annual independent audit of vendors, which began in mid-2007, is proceeding smoothly. Vendor audit status is now indicated in the Register of Vendors on the COUNTER website.

Third, in a previous Bulletin I reported to you on the results of the first stage of a feasibility study into the development of a new, usage-based metric of journal value and status – Usage Factor- derived from the COUNTER usage statistics. As the results of this survey were very positive, its sponsor, the UK Serials Group has decided to test the concept further, using real publisher usage data. The next stage of this project will be jointly funded by UKSG and other organizations.

Peter Shepherd

Director

  1. CODES OF PRACTICE

Journals and Databases: Release 2

By March 2008 almost 100 vendors were compliant with Release 2 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. The independent annual audit of vendor reports, initiated in 2007, is proceeding well and the majority of compliant vendors have now been independently audited. Vendor audit status is indicated in the Register of Vendors on the COUNTER website at . Vendors that have not yet been audited should note, from the Register, the date by which their audit is due.

Each COUNTER-compliant vendor is contacted individually at least three months before their audit is due to remind them of the deadline date for their audit, to provide further details of the audit process

Vendors may choose any Chartered Accountant (UK), Certified Public Accountant (USA), or their equivalent elsewhere to carry out the audit. Alternatively, they may use ABCE, a not-for-profit organization that has been approved as an auditor by COUNTER. Vendors that are COUNTER members will benefit from a reduced price for the ABCE audit. Further information on the ABCE audit process and the schedule of fees may be found on the Code of Practice page on the COUNTER website at

Journals and Databases: Draft Release 3

The development of Release 3 is well advanced and a draft of this new Release has been published on the COUNTER website ( to obtain feedback. The new features incorporated into this draft are the result of input from librarians, library consortium managers, publishers and vendors via focus groups and other channels. Comments on this draft Release are welcome and will be accepted until 31 May 2008.

The main objectives of Release 3 of the Code of Practice are: first, 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.; second, to provide tools that will facilitate the consolidation, management and analysis of the COUNTER usage statistics; third, to improve the COUNTER usage reports for library consortia; fourth, to improve the reporting of the usage of journal archives. The main features of the draft Release 3 are:

  • Incorporation of the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol into the COUNTER Code of Practice. SUSHI has been developed by NISO (National Information Standards Organization) in co-operation with COUNTER and in 2007 became a NISO standard (Z39.93). Implementation of the SUSHI protocol by vendors will allow the automated retrieval of the COUNTER usage reports into local systems, making this process much less time consuming for the librarian or library consortium administrator.
  • 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.
  • Journal Report 1a: Number of successful full-text article requests from an archive. This report , which enables the usage of separately available journal archives to be reported separately, has been an optional additional report since 2006 and is now a proposed to be required report from vendors who sell archives separately
  • A new protocol that requires federated searches to be isolated from bona fide searches by genuine users. The growing use of federated searches has the potential to inflate enormously the search and session counts in Database Report 1 and Database Report 3 and this protocol is designed to mitigate such inflation.
  • 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
  • A new protocol that requires prefetched full-text articles to be excluded from the figures reported in all reports containing full-text requests.

Timetable

The Draft Release 3 of the Code of Practice for Journals and Databases will be available for comment on the COUNTER website ( ) until 31 May 2008. Comments should be sent by email to the Project Director, Dr Peter T Shepherd at

Comments received will be taken into account by the COUNTER Executive Committee in compiling the final version of Release 3, which should be published on the COUNTER website before the end of June 2008, with a view to becoming the definitive version of the Code of Practice, with which vendors must comply, from the beginning of 2009.

Books and Reference Works: Release 1

Since publication of Release 1 of the Code of Practice for Books and Reference Works in April 2006, 10 vendors have become compliant. Uptake has so far been relatively slow, partly because customer demand for usage reports for online books has not yet been strong. There are signs, however, that this is beginning to change and there is growing interest in compliance from vendors.

  1. RESEARCH

COUNTER actively co-operates with other organizations to further the improvement of standards for usage statistics and to develop new metrics derived from usage statistics.

UKSG Usage Factor Feasibility Study

ISI’s journal Impact Factors, based on citation data, have become generally accepted as a valid measure of the quality of scholarly journals, and are widely used by publishers, authors, funding agencies and librarians as measures of journal quality. There are, nevertheless, misgivings about an over-reliance on Impact Factor alone in this respect. The availability of the majority of significant scholarly journals online, combined with the availability of increasingly credible COUNTER-compliant online usage statistics, raises the possibility of a parallel usage-based measure of journal performance becoming a viable additional metric. Such a metric, the Journal Usage Factor, could be based on the data contained in COUNTER Journal Report 1 (Number of Successful Full-text Article Requests by Month and Journal) calculated as illustrated in Equation 1 below for an individual journal:

Equation 1 Usage Factor =

Total usage over period ‘x’ of items published online during period ‘y’

Total items published online during period ‘y’

UKSG has sponsored a study into the feasibility of developing and implementing a journal Usage factor based on Equation 1. The recently completed Stage 1 of this study demonstrated not only that the concept is a meaningful one, but also that there is considerable support from the publisher, librarian and research community for this new metric.

Principal among the conclusions of the Stage 1 survey are:

  • the majority of publishers are supportive of the UF concept, appear to be willing, in principle to participate in the calculation and publication of UFs, and are prepared to see their journals ranked according to UF
  • there is a diversity of opinion on the way in which UF should be calculated, in particular on how to define the following terms: ‘total usage’, ‘specified usage period’, and ‘total number of articles published online’. Tests with real usage data will be required to refine the definitions for these terms.
  • publishers are, on the whole, unwilling to provide their usage data to a third party for consolidation and for calculation of UF. The majority appear to be willing to calculate UFs for their own journals and to have this process audited. This is generally perceived as a natural extension of the work already being done for COUNTER. While it may have implications for systems, these are not seen as being problematic.
  • COUNTER is on the whole trusted by librarians and publishers and is seen as having a role in the development and maintenance of UFs, possibly in partnership with another industry organization. Any organization filling this role must be trusted by both librarians and publishers and include representatives of publishers and librarians.
  • the COUNTER usage statistics are not yet seen as a solid enough foundation on which to build a new global measure such as Usage Factor, but confidence in them is growing and they are seen as the only viable basis for UF
  • there are several structural problems with online usage data that would have to be addressed for UFs to be credible. Notable among these is the perception that online usage data is much more easily manipulated than is citation data.

The full results of this survey may be found on the UKSG website at UKSG has now invited proposals to take this forward by undertaking a Stage 2 study to explore further the practical issues associated with the implementation of a Journal Usage Factor derived from COUNTER usage data.

  1. ORGANIZATION

a)Current membership categories and prices

At the end of 2007 COUNTER had 221 paid members. The membership prices have been increased by 3% for 2008. The 2008 membership prices are:

  • Publisher £545 ($825)
  • Intermediary £545 ($825)
  • Library £273 ($412)
  • Library Consortium £365 ($545)
  • Industry Organization £273 ($412).

A breakdown of the COUNTER membership in December 2007 is given in Table 1 below.

Table 1: Membership of COUNTER Online Metrics in December 2007

Region/Category / Library / Library Consortium / Vendor / Industry Organization / Library affiliate / Total
USA/Canada / 44 / 39 / 30 / 7 / 2 / 122
United Kingdom / 20 / 2 / 12 / 5 / 2 / 41
Europe / 10 / 9 / 8 / 1 / 1 / 29
ROW / 14 / 9 / 6 / 0 / 0 / 29
Total / 88 / 59 / 56 / 13 / 5 / 221

b)2008 membership status

So far 225 organizations have applied for and have been invoiced for 2008 Counter Online Metrics membership. Of these over 130 had already paid by mid-March. Our target is to increase the membership to 250 for 2008.

  1. FINANCIAL

The budgeted income for COUNTER for 2008 is £96600. The total value of 2008 memberships invoiced to date is £76.8k (at an exchange rate of £1=$2.00), compared with £68.5k at the end of March 2007, when the US$ wasstronger). So far £36.5k has been received against these invoices, which is similar to the equivalent period in 2007.

COUNTER’s finances are generally sound. Thanks to the ongoing support of our membership and strict cost control we have covered our expenses and have carried forward a modest surplus every year since we began. The surplus carried forward into 2008 from 2007 was £12561.00.

  1. COUNTER Organization
  • 2008 General Meetings

In order to give the maximum number of COUNTER members the opportunity to participate in the Annual General Meetings, the COUNTER Board of Directors has decided that two such meetings will be held each year, both associated with conferences at which a large number of members are likely to be present. Beginning in 2008, one General Meeting will be held in the UK, during the annual conference of the UK Serials Group (7-9 April) and another in the USA, during the Charleston Conference (5-8 November). Members have already been notified of the UK General Meeting, which will take place on Monday 7 April at 16.30. A notice of the US General Meeting will be circulated in due course.

  • Changes to membership of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee

During 2008 Christine Fyfe and David Goodman will retire from the Board of Directors, as their professional responsibilities no longer focus on usage statistics. We shall miss both Christine and David and worthy replacements for these two important, founding members of the Board are currently being sought.

At the end of 2007 Christine Fyfe and David Goodman also resigned from the Executive Committee. The new members of the Executive Committee are: Terry Bucknell (Liverpool University, UK), Adam Chandler (Cornell University, USA) John Mc Donald (Claremont College, USA). We welcome all three to the COUNTER Executive Committee.

  1. COUNTER training workshops

The joint UKSG/COUNTER programme of day-long workshops for librarians, which began in December 2005, continued with 3 workshops in 2006 and 3 in 2007, which include the first US-based workshop, held at Yale in November. So far one workshop, at Trinity College Dublin, has been held during 2008. The objective of these workshops is to help familiarise librarians with COUNTER, and the practical implementation of the vendor usage reports. Each workshop includes a hands-on session in which participants used ‘live’ COUNTER reports, as well as presentations from COUNTER, a librarian, a vendor and a library systems supplier. Dates and locations for the workshops will be announced on the COUNTER website. ( )

  1. 2008 Conferences and Events

COUNTER will have a presence at the following conferences during 2008:

  • 2008 UK Serials Group Annual Conference, Torquay: 7-9 April
  • 2008 LIBER Annual Conference, Istanbul: 1-5 July
  • 2008 Charleston Conference, Charleston, SC: 5-7 November

We look forward to seeing you there!

  1. Contact us

For any further information, please contact Peter Shepherd, Project Director at . The latest information on COUNTER can be found on our website at: .

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