BEST PRACTICE GUIDANCE

COUNTER has always tried to reflect the usage reporting needs of the knowledge community, and we encourage community members to tell us when there are gaps in the Code of Practice. However, we have also committed to keeping major releases of the Code infrequent, as they create a great deal of work for both report providers (publishers and technology services) and report consumers (libraries and consortia).

On this page, you’ll find best practice guidance that has been developed by COUNTER volunteers and amended through community consultations, as well as a list of other issues we’re currently working on.

Syndicated Usage

Content syndication is becoming increasingly common. This best practice guidance applies to content that is syndicated and available on multiple platforms, describing how syndication platforms should share COUNTER-compliant usage reports with publishers.

Sharing reports this way will mean publishers have consistent, comparable usage metrics from all the syndicated usage platforms they work with, and can tell which ones are delivering return on the time and effort invested in syndication. Where institutional reporting can be delivered in compliance with the guidance, libraries will be able to see comprehensive usage reporting for a publisher’s content, regardless of the platform on which usage occurs.

Current investigations

Reporting to multiple identities

Publisher platforms often offer multiple authentication methods to end users, whether that’s IP recognition, GetFTR, Shibboleth, or username-and-password. This is great in terms of allowing a user to access content, but creates an issue when a single user can be connected to more than one institution during their session. What we aim to determine during these focus groups is how the community as a whole would like this situation to be handled, as well as developing fall-back positions for where this preferred outcome is not technically possible.

Generative AI

The introduction of GenAI technologies on publisher platforms is throwing up all sorts of questions about what can be counted, when, and why. These focus groups will be a starting point for COUNTER to understand what is being built, how that interacts with our existing Code of Practice, and how the community would like to see us address the questions of usage metrics for genAI.

Get involved

If you are interested in participating in developing best practices, or there is a topic you’d like us to tackle, take a look at our blog post on focus groups or let us know by emailing tasha@countermetrics.org