News
COUNTER newsletter, July 2026
Lots of news this July, from a reminder that fix-and-feature Release 5.1.1 is live and calls for responses to two community consultations, to an update from the Taming the Crocodile…
Making changes
There’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…
Have your say: optimising for OA
Libraries are under pressure to shift to OA while at the same time increase their reliance on data driven decision making. One key challenge is that the shift to open…
Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure: 2026 update
COUNTER is a community-led organisation and our Code of Practice is the industry standard for usage metrics. In 2024 we committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), and…
Looking back at the 2026 COUNTER Conference
This year was the third annual COUNTER Conference, and it was the biggest and best yet. With more than 470 registered attendees, up from 277 last year, it was clear…
Date formatting and text strings
The Code of Practice requires publishers to offer tabular versions of their COUNTER reports. Most providers offer two formats: tab separated files (.tsv) and Excel files (.xlsx). We also specify…
Baking best practices into the Code
We’ve pulled in some of our recent work on best practice guidelines to the Code as part of the fix-and-feature Release 5.1.1. These are new features which are either optional,…
COUNTER for repositories
The Code of Practice for Research Data (CRD) was a milestone in data evaluation practices. It made it possible to report comparable usage counts across repositories and other data platforms.…
COUNTER’s bot repository
For many years, COUNTER’s list of bots and spiders was hosted in a GitHub repository that we didn’t control. As part of the fix-and-feature Release 5.1.1 of the Code of…