When to expect Release 5.1 reports

We’ve started to receive questions from librarians asking when they’ll be able to access COUNTER Release 5.1 reports, and thought it might be helpful to have a post here for everyone to share. (Tasha might also point people here rather than typing out the answers every time…)

The due date: January 2025

Report providers are required to start delivering R5.1 reports for usage that happens in January 2025. The Code has always allowed four weeks for processing data, which means that we expect to see all providers delivering the new reports by the 28th of February 2025. As we said in our post on common Validation Tool errors, a good number of report providers have already started testing their new reports and are on track to offer R5.1 reports by that deadline.

Report providers also need to keep offering Release 5 reports for usage in January to March 2025 (reports delivered by the 28th of April). The overlap period is designed to smooth the transition for everyone.

What happens if report providers are late?

We know that there are still publishers offering non-compliant Release 4-style reports, nearly six years after Release 5 became the standard. The changes from R5 to R5.1 are much smaller than those from R4 to R5, so we are confident that report providers will make the necessary upgrades, but we have to be pragmatic and acknowledge that some will be late. The COUNTER team is doing as much as they can to encourage speedy compliance with R5.1, but the power is in the hands of report consumers to push for publishers to get the work done. If you are a librarian or consortia manager and you want publishers and aggregators to upgrade to R5.1, please tell them so!

Where to find information

What we will be doing is keeping the COUNTER Registry up to date, meaning it will be easy for everyone to see when a report provider has started to offer R5.1 reports and whether they’ve been audited.

As soon as any report provider lets us know that they are ready for librarians and consortia to access R5.1 reports, we’ll be adding that information to the COUNTER Registry. You can sort the compliant platforms list in the Registry by COUNTER Release if you are using the user interface, and the /counter-release endpoint of the Registry API will also let you find that information. We’ll also be posting about R5.1 compliance on this blog and on our social media accounts.