COUNTER newsletter, July 2026

Lots of news this July, from a reminder that fix-and-feature Release 5.1.1 is live and calls for responses to two community consultations, to an update from the Taming the Crocodile project and news about staffing changes at COUNTER. Read it all below.

I’m sending this out just before my summer break. Because COUNTER is so small, me being on holiday means the office is closed until I get back in early August. If you’ve got technical questions, email the listserv on community@countermetrics.org and someone should be able to help you.

Code of Practice Release 5.1.1

We have published the latest fix and feature release of the COUNTER Code of Practice, R5.1.1. As well as the usual bug fixes and clarifications, we’ve some new features. These are either optional or backwards compatible, so no existing COUNTER R5.1 implementations should break. Key changes are

• COUNTER’s bot repository has migrated to a GitHub repository that we control.
• We’ve merged the Code for Research Data into the main Code, as Section 10.4.
• And the Pathway to Compliance and Syndicated Usage best practices are now part of the Code.

Staffing changes

You might have spotted on our website that COUNTER is finally going to have a full-time member of staff. Starting in August, I’ll be stepping up from part-time to full-time. That extra time will give COUNTER flexibility to more effectively develop and maintain the Code, extend our educational offerings, and introduce new technical services.

As we embrace this new chapter, we also say a heartfelt goodbye to Siân Harris, who has been absolutely central to the changes we’ve made over the last couple of years. From developing and implementing our community engagement strategy, coordinating the COUNTER Conference, and supporting the Academy, her help has been invaluable.

Siân will be plenty busy, as she’s increasing her hours communicating population health research at the University of Bristol, as well as working on other communication and engagement projects. She invites you to stay in touch with her via LinkedIn.

Have your say

There’s a new consultation out on COUNTER best practices, and this one’s on open access. Check it out and send us your feedback. You’ve got until the OASPA conference, so plenty of time!

There’s also a consultation open on aggregating usage metrics. This is an update to the original 2019 guidelines for consortia and national bodies, describing how their constituent libraries should report back. Things have changed, not least with the publication of Release 5.1, so we’re updating the guidelines. If you’re involved with usage metrics aggregation and you have comments on the draft, please get in touch with Tasha by the end of August.

AI has already captured a third of research discovery – what do we need to do to retain and reclaim usage?

Kudos’s “Taming the Crocodile” project, which was presented at our Conference back in June, reveals just how fast AI is reshaping scholarly information-seeking. Drawing on surveys of 11,500 researchers and 200 librarians plus an environment scan of 300+ sources, the Phase I report finds that one in ten researchers now start with an AI tool, and a further 25% begin in search engines where AI answers are embedded. Librarians report the knock-on effect on usage metrics is already putting subscriptions at risk. The report sets out concrete actions for marketing, editorial and technology teams, and Phase II will move the sector towards shared standards for the schema, mark-up and machine-readable signals AI systems need to accurately ingest and attribute scholarly content.

The Kudos team has made a snapshot available for everyone. Download it to learn more about the project’s findings, recommendations and how to sign up for Phase II: https://info.growkudos.com/croc-pub.

Tech support

While much of the focus has been on R5.1.1, we’ve also posted quite a few technical support pieces on the blog recently:

• Privacy, GDPR, and reporting
• How text and data mining activity can be audited
• Whether publishers can show usage from multiple platforms in one report
• Why COUNTER doesn’t ask for Excel date formats in tabular reports
• When Release 5 will be retired