Interview: Michael Sisolak, co-chair of the COUNTER Advisory Board

In the latest post interviewing key volunteers within the COUNTER community we hear from Michael Sisolak. Michael is co-chair of the new COUNTER Advisory Board (along with Michelle Urberg).

Who are you and who do you work for? 

I am the Chief Technology Architect at Sage, a global educational publisher. I have been working directly with Sage since their acquisition of CQ Press in 2008 and as an employee since 2018. I’ve held my current role for the last nine months, having moved over from our Software Engineering group.

What is your role with COUNTER?

I currently serve as co-chair of the COUNTER Advisory Committee and chair the AI and Bots Working Group. This group is evaluating how to account for AI tools and crawlers in usage metrics.

When and why did you get involved?

My involvement with COUNTER started back in 2005. At the time I was part of GVPi, a bespoke web application developer with a number of academic and library customers. One of our customers, Kluwer Law Online, came to us with the requests they were hearing from their customers about a standard for providing site usage statistics called COUNTER. We implemented the Code of Practice Release 2 for Kluwer that year. We then expanded it across other customers such as the American Library Association, Social Law Library, and CQ Press. 

I have continued with the enhancement, development, and re-development of COUNTER compliant systems through our R5.1 implementation earlier this year. I have now handed over support and future development to another team at Sage. However, the risk and potential of AI for academic publishing led me to get more involved with the COUNTER Metrics organization.

How has COUNTER grown and developed over the time you have been involved? 

As COUNTER has progressed through release revisions, the language and specificity of the requirements has greatly improved. For publishers, platform providers, librarians, and researchers, the latest requirements provide a solid understanding of what to expect when implementing and interpreting usage reports. Over the last two decades, the jump from Release 4 to Release 5 was the most significant implementation we undertook. It was a technical challenge having to keep both releases running simultaneously. The day we finally removed R4 from our systems was quite a celebration!

Why is it important that COUNTER exists?

As a platform developer, both when independent and representing Sage, being able to provide a single standard of reporting has been critical. It enables us to deliver usage data without having every subscription contract come with a unique set of requirements. 

The standard has also been key in maintaining the consistency of usage statistics during the integration of acquisitions. The audit process can be time consuming. However, when customers see our COUNTER audit status they know they can trust the analytics we are providing. 

What role do you anticipate COUNTER will play in the future?

Looking ahead, COUNTER faces significant challenges in accounting for a rapidly changing environment for publishers while maintaining the commitment to the fix/feature/breaking release schedule. Publishers and users are using a proliferation of open access models and AI tools . Therefore, ensuring COUNTER reporting remains the trusted standard for usage metrics is more critical than ever. The COUNTER community’s commitment to collaboration and the organization’s strong foundation position us to continue providing the reliable, standardized metrics that our industry depends on. I’m excited to be part of shaping that future.