Retiring Release 5
22 June 2026One of the questions that comes to me reasonably frequently is about when Release 5 will be retired. The answer, of course, is “it depends on what you mean by retired”.
If we’re talking about when publishers can stop delivering R5 reports, there are two factors in play. First, we required three months during which both R5 and R5.1 reports were available to libraries (dual running). After that dual running period, the usual rule about having year-to-date plus two back years of reports (YTD+2) still applies, but we don’t specify a particular format.
I’m posting this on 22 June, so YTD+2 means publishers who completed their migration to R5.1 on time will have:
- R5 reports for January to December 2024.
- R5 and R5.1 reports for January to March 2025.
- R5.1 reports for April 2025 to April 2026.
YTD+2 means libraries need to be able to harvest January 2024 to December 2026, so the R5 reports for 2024 needs to remain accessible at least until the December 2026 reports are available. When the January 2027 reports become available (due date: 28 Feb 2027), publishers no longer need to maintain their 2024 data and they can retire their old R5 services.
Reprocessed data
Some publishers chose to re-process their older usage data into R5.1 format. As long as the reprocessed data covers YTD+2, those publishers can retire their R5 systems early.
What about the Registry?
We kept Release 4 information in the Registry until March 2023, four years after the compliance date with R5, for the subset of publishers who’d left their R4 services up and running. Our plan is to keep information about R5 reports and COUNTER API (sushi) services available in the Registry for the same amount of time, meaning it’ll show up until March 2029, unless publishers tell us they’ve closed the R5 service. Those reports come with a health warning, though, as no R5 reports have been audited since 2024.
And the Code?
The Code is built and maintained in GitHub, and rendered through Read the Docs. We’ll keep the R5 Code live there. There’s also an archive of all previous releases of the Code in PDF format on this website.