COUNTER newsletter, May 2026

Spring is in full bloom here in the UK, and just as the flowers are coming up so are COUNTER’s best practices. We’ve published three since the last newsletter, including one on usage metrics for AI. There are two more in progress: OA reporting, and consortial usage metrics aggregation. You can read more about those below.

Spring also brings the COUNTER Conference and AGM. This annual event is free for members, and there’s a link for registering below. We’ve made the videos from 2025 available for non-members and they’re also linked in this newsletter.

The turning of the seasons isn’t all sunshine, and we’re saying goodbye to some long-serving members of our Executive Committee. We’re immensely grateful to Oliver Pesch and Nicola Haden for all of their efforts over the years. If you think you might like to join Exec, spring down to the last item below.

Best practices

We published three best practices in April 2026, including the one that everyone’s been asking for – usage metrics for generative and agentic AI.

There’s also the new Pathway to Compliance for very small publishers, and guidelines on reporting when users have multiple institutional identities.

There are two more best practices in development. The first is on usage reporting for open access, and we’ve a great working group in place. The second is an update to some very old guidelines about how consortia and national bodies can aggregate usage metrics. If you’d like to contribute to that project, drop Tasha an email.

Learn from your peers at the FREE COUNTER Conference and AGM

We’ve got a great line up for the COUNTER Conference and AGM on 11 June this year, including a session from Tasha all about the new AI usage guidelines.

As always, the Conference is a free, member-only event. It’s a digital event, running in the afternoon UK time to maximise accessibility for our worldwide community.

All members are invited to register. We’re also offering some free tickets for libraries that are part of consortia members of COUNTER. If that’s you, please contact your consortium to ask for one of their tickets.

We’ve also made the videos from our 2025 Conference available on the website.

• Measuring usage in an open access world
• Facilitating direct access to usage data
• Reporting COUNTER metrics for Open Access journals
• The new COUNTER Validation Tool
• Annual General Meeting
• One-potato-two-potato…choosing the best metric for your analyses
• Monitoring the Evolution of Usage in SciELO Brazil Publications Through COUNTER Metrics
• Using PowerBI to visualise COUNTER metrics

Updated Friendly Guides

Tasha’s been working her way through the Friendly Guides on our Education pages. All eight guides are now available in accessible full-text HTML, as well as PDF. Several of the guides have been heavily revised and extended to answer more of your questions.

• The OA guide has a new section on how Access Type: Open got its definition.
• The Tech guide has lots more information about how Data Types and Parent Data Types work together.
• The Compliance guide has a vastly expanded section on handling platform migrations, a whole new section on the Pathway, and links to supporting documents for auditors.
• And the guide about Using Reports now includes videos about importing .tsv files into Excel, how to configure reports before you download them, the kinds of analysis you can do, and more. If you need more detail, do sign up for our in-depth online learning with COUNTER Academy!

The original guides are still available in translation in Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish.

Join our Executive Committee

Two members of COUNTER’s Executive Committee have come to the ends of their terms of office. We owe a debt of gratitude to Oliver Pesch and Nicola Haden for their support and guidance over the years.

As a result of these changes in Exec, we’ve vacancies for new people to join the group. If you are interested in being one of those new people please take a look at the Terms of Reference, then drop an email to Tasha. We’ll need either a CV or your LinkedIn profile, plus a paragraph or two explaining why you want to join Exec and how you can help move COUNTER forward.