COUNTER newsletter, September 2025

It’s been a busy few months, as we said in our newsletter yesterday.

Earlier this year, at the AGM, the COUNTER membership approved a new membership structure. If you are a COUNTER member your key contacts will be receiving an email explaining your new membership category and what it means for you. Look out for our blog post next week explaining the 2026 pricing, as well as an updated membership page on our website.

Talking of member benefits, we are already on Module 6 (of eight) of the first COUNTER Academy course. The participants have been really engaged, feedback has been positive and we are enjoying seeing this course develop. If you are a COUNTER member and want to be part of the Academy in 2026 then please express your interest in this form.

We have also set a date for the next COUNTER conference – 11 June 2026. Do put the date in your diaries and look out for our call for speakers later in the year. Don’t forget, we can only build the conference from the suggestions we receive!

This latest newsletter brings updates from our Generative and Agentic AI Working Group, our usual tech advice posts, and interviews with members of the COUNTER community. There is also a reminder of our community survey. Thank you to the very many of you who have already given us your feedback; if you want to make your voice heard, the deadline is the end of October.

Best wishes,
Tasha and Sian

Generative and Agentic AI: updates from our working group

What is COUNTER doing about generative and agentic AI and bots? This is a task that one of our new working groups has begun to look at. Read what the group has done so far in our news piece.

Get to know the COUNTER community

We are very grateful to the many people across the COUNTER community who get involved in committees and help guide the development of the Code, how we share it with others, and the management of COUNTER itself.

We’ve recently added some more posts to our occasional collection of interviews with key COUNTER volunteers:

• Michael Sisolak, co-Chair of the Advisory Board.
• Heather Staines, member of the Executive and Education Committees.

Boost your knowledge with our latest tech posts

Our latest round up of recent blog posts to help you make the most of COUNTER:

• How to load .tsv files into Excel
• New guide on comparing reports and standard views
• All about Release 5.1 … in German
• Exception codes for when legacy data don’t exist in R5.1 reports

Survey receives amazing response, but there’s still time to respond

Thank you to the many people who have responded to our community survey. We have already had more responses than any previous survey.

Over 80% of responses have been from librarians and consortia managers. We’re keen to make sure that publishers and technology providers also make their voices heard before the survey closes at the end of October.

Make sure you have your say on what you think of COUNTER today and how we should develop it in the future.