Best practice guidance: multiple identities

We’ve had three best practices under construction recently, and today we’ve published the last of them. This guidance explains how publishers should manage reporting where a single user is linked to lots of institutional identities. As with all best practices, this was open to community consultation before being revised and then approved by the COUNTER Executive Committee in April 2026.

Thanks go to our working group, who helped pick through all of the possible solutions to this knotty problem before arriving at a finished guideline:

• Senol Akay, American Chemical Society
• Melissa Belvadi, University of Prince Edward Island
• Sonja Lendi, Elsevier
• Stuart Maxwell, Scholarly iQ
• Oliver Pesch, EBSCO
• Jon Slinn, Atypon

You can find the guidance, and others, on our Best Practice page.