COUNTER Newsletter, June 2024

You might have noticed that the COUNTER team has had a busy few months, with a new strategy, branding and website, as well as our first ever COUNTER conference! We plan to take things just a smidge easier over the summer, but there’s still plenty going on and you can find out all about it down below. We particularly want you to provide feedback on our open policy consultations and to our annual satisfaction survey!

All the best – Tasha

Community consultations

We have two open consultations at the moment. As always, the more community feedback we receive the better the eventual policies will be!

Syndicated usage

We know that content syndication is becoming ever-more popular, and that means COUNTER needs to find a way to allow people to share COUNTER-compliant usage reports from the syndicated platform to the original publisher. That will mean publishers have consistent, comparable usage metrics from all the syndicated usage platforms they work with, and can tell which ones are delivering return on the time and effort invested in syndication. Equally, we might be able to facilitate aggregate institutional reporting, so librarians only have to check one report for all of the content from a publisher.

Have your say on our draft policy by emailing me before 28 June.

Code of Practice for Research Data

The COUNTER Code of Practice for Research Data provided a key milestone in data evaluation practices by making it possible to report comparable usage counts across platforms. Over the last months, Make Data Count and COUNTER have collaborated to explore an update to the Code of Practice for Research Data, and we are now sharing our proposal to merge the Code of Practice for Research Data with COUNTER R5.1.

If you’re interested in usage metrics for research data, please send in your feedback to our consultation before the end of July.

Partner with us on a new Validation Tool

Our Validation Tool is an essential service to the community, helping publishers and libraries validate Release 5 COUNTER Reports. We are now seeking a partner to help us build a new COUNTER Validation Tool to better serve our community. The new tool needs to consist of a user interface, administrative tools, control systems, and COUNTER API (sushi) tests. It also needs to make use of the existing testing module, which will remain separate.

If you are interested in being that partner, please review the Validation Tool RFI and send your response to tasha@countermetrics.org by 17.00 BST on the 27th of June 2024.

COUNTER is a POSI signatory

We’re a community-led organisation and our Code of Practice is the industry standard for usage metrics. That’s why we have chosen to sign up to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), which we feel align well with our mission and values. You can find our detailed self-assessment against POSI on our website.

Tell us what you think of COUNTER

Our annual satisfaction survey is now open. Please let us know how we’re doing and where we can improve! It should only take a few minutes and your responses are vital in helping ensure COUNTER addresses the needs of the whole community. The survey deadline is 7th September.

Events and training

Check out the (very abbreviated) list of upcoming events below and consider signing up!

From ALPSP…

• Understanding Copyright, 25 & 27 June
• Creating an Inclusive Culture, 16 & 17 July
• ALPSP also has a Library Publishing special interest group, open to non-members as well as members. 

And from UKSG, we have Bridging the divide between the media and research: building trust in better communication seminar, 3 & 4 July – this one’s now FREE to attend!

If you run an organisation offering education or events and would like to be included in future newsletters, get in touch with sian@countermetrics.org.

And keep an eye on our news pages and social media for news of events where you can hear from COUNTER.