Making changes
23 July 2026There’s never a dull moment at COUNTER. While summer is a slightly quieter period – we’ve fewer events to attend, Release 5.1.1 is live, and membership renewals won’t start for a while – there are still things happening behind the scenes. The most significant is that, 23 years after we were founded, COUNTER is finally going to have a full-time member of staff. Starting on the 1st of August, Tasha will be stepping up from part-time to full-time as our Executive Director.
What this means for you
This transition is not an administrative change. It reflects our commitment to maintaining and developing the standard you rely on.
- With dedicated full-time focus, we can more effectively maintain and extend the COUNTER Code of Practice, including more best practices as well as regular fix and feature releases.
- We can deepen our support for the COUNTER Academy and expand our educational reach through new resources, including new videos, more friendly guides, and faster responses to community questions.
- Extra hours means we can introduce new technical support services for our growing global membership. For example, we’re planning an ‘audit readiness’ service to help publishers – including those on the Pathway to Compliance – be sure their reports are on point.
A fond farewell to Siân
As we embrace this new chapter, we also say a heartfelt goodbye to Siân Harris.
Siân has been absolutely central to COUNTER’s recent successes. She was instrumental in getting our community engagement strategy up and running, and her contributions to the COUNTER Conference and the Academy have been invaluable. We will miss her deeply, and hope to bring her back for projects in future.
Siân will be plenty busy, as she’s increasing her hours communicating population health research at the University of Bristol, as well as working on other communication and engagement projects. We know she’s going to be brilliant!