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 developed by our volunteers and amended through community consultations. There is also a list of live projects that we’re working on.
Generative and Agentic AI
Generative and agentic artificial intelligence systems (“AI”) have proliferated since publication of Release 5.1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. This best practice guidance extends R5.1 to facilitate usage reporting of publisher content by AI systems. The first phase of our work is designed primarily for use by publishers with AI systems embedded on their platforms, but it can also be used by third-party providers of AI tools.
Pathway to Compliance
For smaller publishers, full COUNTER compliance can be a major technical challenge. This best practice guidance identifies incremental steps that non-compliant publishers could take to make their usage reporting easier to access and more valuable to report consumers.
Syndicated Usage
Content syndication is becoming increasingly common. Our syndicated usage best practice guidance applies to content available on multiple platforms. It describes 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. It will help them understand which ones are delivering return on the time and effort invested in syndication. The guidance also explains how institutional COUNTER reports can include syndicated usage. That will allow libraries to see comprehensive usage reporting for a publisher’s content, no matter where the usage happens.
Current projects
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 when it allows a user to access content, but it might create an issue when the user can be connected to more than one institution during their session. Our goal for this project is to determine how the community would like to see usage reporting for users with multiple institutional links. We’re also going to develop fall-back positions for where the preferred outcome is not technically possible.
Open access
The Advisory Committee decided to launch a new best practice working group on usage metrics for open access in 2026, starting work in April.
Get involved
If you are interested in participating in developing best practices, or there is a topic you’d like us to tackle, consider joining the Advisory Committee to represent your member organisation. You can also share topics by for best practice by emailing tasha@countermetrics.org.