How to spot a global report

We told you yesterday about new Registry filters, including how to find a Global Item Report. One of the questions you ask pretty frequently is what distinguishes a global report from a regular institutional usage report. As it says in the Friendly Guide to COUNTER for OA,

“Most publishers tell us that a proportion of their usage can’t be linked to an institution, so R5.1 includes instructions to attribute that usage to ‘The World’. By adding together all of the institution-linked (attributed) usage with The World usage, publishers can create a global COUNTER report.”

All well and good, but what do global reports look like? The short answer is, exactly the same as a regular COUNTER report. There are extensions that can be added, like geographic breakdown, and we’ve created sample global reports to highlight those – take a look below. For the most part, however, the main difference between an institutional and a global report is in two fields of the report header: Institution_Name and Institution_ID. Read on to see what that looks like in tabular and JSON formats.

Global report headers

COUNTER report headers include both Institution_Name and Institution_ID. In global reports, such as the Global Item Report, we say that the name must be “The World”. The identifier is a {namespace}:{value} pair. The namespace will usually show that this is a proprietary identifier or the platform ID, rather than a standard like ROR. The value has to be “0000000000000000”.

Tabular reports

This example table is drawn from the sample COUNTER reports in Appendix G of the Code of Practice. All we’ve done is replace the Institution_Name and Institution_ID fields to show what we’d expect in a global report.

JSON reports

The example JSON is the same sample Item report from Appendix G.

{
  "Report_Header": {
    "Release": "5.1",
    "Report_ID": "IR",
    "Report_Name": "Item Report",
    "Created": "2026-08-01T09:10:10Z",
    "Created_By": "Sample Publisher",
    "Institution_ID": {
      "Proprietary": [
        "P1:0000000000000000"
      ]
    },
    "Institution_Name": "The World",
    "Registry_Record": "https://registry.countermetrics.org/platform/99999999-9999-9999-9999-999999999999",
    "Report_Attributes": {
      "Attributes_To_Show": [
        "Authors",
        "Publication_Date",
        "Article_Version",
        "YOP",
        "Access_Type",
        "Access_Method"
      ],
      "Include_Parent_Details": "True"
    },
    "Report_Filters": {
      "Begin_Date": "2026-01-01",
      "End_Date": "2026-06-31"
    }
  },

Sample Global Item Reports

The sample reports in Appendix G of the Code are for the mandatory reports. The buttons below give you access to the tabular and JSON versions of a Global Item Report including the optional extensions for breaking the report down by country, and by attribution.

With thanks to Scholarly iQ, who provided real files that we could use as a basis for these samples.