Syndicated usage and goodbye to DUL

On Tuesday 22 April, Tasha participated in an STM Association webinar. She spoke about our syndicated usage best practice guidance and how the new guidance replaces the old Distributed Usage Logging project.

Distributed Usage Logging, or DUL for short (believe us, we know how bad that name is!), is described in Section 6.3 of the Code of Practice:

“DUL was an initiative sponsored by Crossref that provides a framework for publishers to capture usage of DOI-identified content items that occurs on other websites, such as aggregators, repositories, and scholarly information-sharing sites. The premise behind DUL was that publishers could register a DUL usage logging end-point with Crossref, which was then mapped to all of the publisher’s DOIs. A content site, such as a repository, could use a content item’s DOI to look up where the publisher wants a transaction to be logged, then use the standard DUL message structure to log the activity. Using DUL could allow a publisher to capture a more complete picture of content usage.”

STM took over parts of the infrastructure from Crossref some time ago. However, they reported that DUL gained little traction, though some organisations are using the DUL JSON schema for information sharing.

Last year COUNTER developed syndicated usage best practice. We believe that there is a real need for publishers and libraries to understand how publisher content is used on syndication sites. We also wanted to find a way to enable this that leveraged existing usage tracking and reporting systems. During the STM webinar, attendees heard about how our guidance works. They also heard how GetFTR facilitates sharing of syndicated usage metrics, and how one of the big technology providers already facilitates syndicated usage metrics.

At the end of the event, everyone agreed that COUNTER’s syndicated usage best practice guidance was a sensible, low-effort alternative to DUL and that the old infrastructure could be safely retired.