News release for COUNTER - Release 3

[Vanessa Murtough <Vanessa.Murtough@iop.org>]

New Schedule for publication and implementation of Release 3 of 
the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases

The draft Release 3of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals 
and Databases http://www.projectcounter.org/r3/r3_release.pdf was 
published in March 2008; comments on it were accepted until 31 
May 2008. During that period feedback from librarians and vendors 
was both extensive and very helpful. The COUNTER Executive 
Committee has reflected on that feedback and will modify Release 
3 as a result. The most significant modifications will be:

* Reporting usage of journal archives: while the requirement for 
reporting the usage of journal archives will remain, it has 
become clear that not all COUNTER-compliant vendors will be able 
to provide Journal Report 1a: Number of Successful Full-text 
Requests from an Archive by Month and Journal, as specified in 
the draft Release 3. For this reason, vendors will be offered the 
option of providing either Journal Report 1a as specified above, 
or a new Journal Report 5 that breaks down usage in the existing 
Journal Report 1 by year of publication, which will allow 
customers to separate out archival usage from ?current 
subscription? usage.

* A new, optional report that allows the reporting of usage of 
online journals and books available on the same platform to be 
included in the same COUNTER report: this reflects the fact that 
a growing number of vendors are making online journals and books 
available on the same platform, often as part of the same 
licence. This new COUNTER report, entitled ?Journal/Book Report 
1: Number of full-text item requests by month and title? , will 
be specified in XML format only and will be modelled on the 
existing Consortium Report 1 already published in the draft 
Release 3

To allow sufficient time for these, as well as other, smaller 
modifications, to be incorporated into the Code of Practice, the 
publication of the final version of Release 3 has been postponed 
from 30 June 2008 to 31 July 2008.

It has also been decided to allow vendors more time to implement 
Release 3. This takes into account the concerns expressed by 
vendors that, while they support SUSHI 
(http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi) and plan to implement the 
SUSHI protocols that enable customers to automate the collection 
and consolidation of COUNTER usage reports from different 
sources, they will require more time for implementation. For this 
reason the deadline date for implementation by vendors of Release 
3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice will be postponed from 1 
January 2009 to 1 August 2009.

About COUNTER

COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) 
is a multi-agency initiative whose objective is to develop a set 
of internationally accepted, extendible Codes of Practice that 
will allow the usage of online information products and services 
to be measured more consistently.

For more information, please contact:
Peter Shepherd
Director - COUNTER
pshepherd@projectCounter.org

Posted by Vanessa Murtough on behalf of COUNTER

Vanessa Murtough
Senior Product Manager
IOP Publishing Ltd
Bristol, BS1 6BE
email: vanessa.murtough@iop.org