COUNTER on the Scholarly Kitchen
23 July 2024COUNTER Executive Director Tasha featured in an interview on the Scholarly Kitchen blog.
In the interview, Tasha told Alice Meadows about the joy of working in research infrastructure and standards, what COUNTER does, who our community is, and more.
One question Alice asked is something that crops up frequently, “how is COUNTER sustained financially?” Tasha explained:
“We’re reliant on members for support — those publishers and libraries who recognize the value in having a shared standard for usage metrics, and contribute to keep us going. We also have a very tiny number of generous sponsors who help us realize specific projects, for example, the groups who helped fund translations of the new Friendly Guides to COUNTER last year.”
One of our volunteers, Melissa Belvadi, commented on the interview noting that:
“As an electronic resources librarian I cannot stress enough how incredibly important the work of COUNTER Metrics is to academic libraries. Many of us are basing huge, even multi-million-dollar annual decisions on the data that vendors provide in compliance with this standard… A vendor who is NOT compliant with COUNTER may find itself in danger of losing customers due to a lack of reliable data to justify the expense of their products.”