TOOLS AND SERVICES
The COUNTER community has developed several tools and services which you may find useful, and we keep a list of them on this page. If you know of others that we should add, please get in touch with tasha@countermetrics.org.
Validation Tool
The COUNTER Validation Tool is designed to validate JSON and tabular reports for Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. The Validation Tool detects missing metrics, as well as metric counts which cannot occur – for example, if there are fewer Total_Item_Requests than Unique_Item_Requests for an item. It is free to use, and we encourage all report providers to test their reports regularly.
We are in the process of updating the testing module behind the Validation Tool to work with Release 5.1 reports, and will update this page when it becomes available.
Harvester Tools
Several groups have built harvester tools to make it easier to gather COUNTER reports, and they are particularly useful for consortia who need to collect COUNTER reports for their affiliated libraries. This page lists the tools we know about in alphabetical order..
CC-PLUS
Developed by eight international library consortia, CC-PLUS is an open source software, community, and administrative tool set for usage statistics management that will support libraries and consortia in data-driven decisions and effective stewardship of electronic resources.
CC-Plus is currently designed to run as a standalone web-based Laravel application connected to a MySQL database and a web server. It allows for consortia to be managed within a host system, and requires COUNTER Release 5 reports.
You can find out more and download the source code at https://palcilibraries.github.io/CC-Plus/.
CzechELib’s Celus tool
Developed by Big Dig Data for the Czech National Centre for Electronic Information Resources, Celus is an open-source solution for managing usage metrics, and is suitable for both single libraries and consortia. Celus processes COUNTER Release 5 reports as well as non-COUNTER data.
You can try the online demo for free at https://www.celus.net/ or download the source code from GitHub (https://github.com/techlib/celus).
EBSCO’s R5 Harvester Tool
Led by Oliver Pesch, the EBSCO Information Services team created this free tool and an associated easy-to-follow manual, which explains how to quickly get the Microsoft Access tool up and running and how to use it. The project is made available to the knowledge community under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
While designed to allow small to medium-sized consortia to gather COUNTER reports for their affiliated libraries, single-site libraries can also use it.
System requirements: Microsoft Access 2016 or later, specifically working with Release 5-compliant COUNTER reports.
ReadMETRICS
Based on the existing open source ezPAARSE and ezMESURE tools, this is a new tool from the Inist-CNRS and Couperin consortia.
You can download the source code from GitHub (https://github.com/ezpaarse-project/readmetrics).
University of Prince Edward Island COUNTER Harvester
Developed by UPEI CompSci students under the guidance of Melissa Belvadi, this COUNTER Release 5 harvester is also a report manager and analysis tool. The team designed the tool for individual libraries rather than consortia, and it works entirely on a local desktop – no server required. You can download the source code from GitHub (https://github.com/CS-4820-Library-Project/COUNTER-5-Report-Tool/releases).
COUNTER Registry
The COUNTER Registry is where you can find information about usage data hosts – the technology groups which provide COUNTER reports – and the platforms or publisher websites that they support. There’s a great deal more about it on the Registry page of this site.