Community Feedback on COUNTER Release 5.1
19 October 2022During summer 2022 we sent out a community consultation for Release 5.1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. The Project Director offered three public webinars, scheduled to allow maximum participation across all time zones, as well as a wrap-up video offering the same content plus responses to all of the questions raised during the webinars and by email. We also offered three routes for providing feedback on the consultation. We received more feedback than in previous consultations, and it has taken some time to digest everything into a readable summary.
The Executive Committee and Technical Advisory Group have reviewed the responses and in line with our commitment to transparency we’re delighted to share the summary of feedback with you.
We wish to reiterate that key aspects of the Code remain unchanged from Release 5: the Platform, Database, Title and Item Reports and their derivative Views remain in place, and the metrics themselves (Investigations, Requests, Searches, and Denials) are similarly unaffected.
The primary changes we proposed to the community were: introducing a more consistent focus on Items as the unit of reporting in place of the traditional focus on Title-level metrics (though Title metrics will remain available); improved definitions of access types (open versus controlled); and some significant upgrades to the COUNTER API (sushi) protocol and associated JSON report structures. The community feedback was broadly in favour of the suggested changes, with some respondents providing useful additional information that will be taken into consideration by the Technical Advisory Group as we work to finalise Release 5.1
For more details, please take a look at the full feedback document.