Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases now published

["Gillingham, Emily - Oxford" <emily.gillingham@wiley.com>]

News Release - 27 August 2008

- Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and 
Databases now published -

The final version of Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice 
for Journals and Databases has now been published on the COUNTER 
website at http://www.projectcounter.org/code_practice.html. The 
deadline date for implementation of this Release is 31 August 
2009, giving vendors a full year to meet its specifications. 
After this date only those vendors compliant with Release 3 will 
be considered COUNTER compliant.

The main objectives of Release 3 are: to improve further the 
reliability of the COUNTER usage reports by incorporating new 
protocols designed to mitigate the potentially inflationary 
effects on usage statistics of federated search engines, internet 
robots, crawlers, etc; to provide tools that will facilitate the 
consolidation, management and analysis of the COUNTER usage 
statistics; to improve the COUNTER usage reports for library 
consortia; and to improve the reporting of the usage of journal 
archives.

The key new features in Release 3 are:

- Incorporation of the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics 
Harvesting Initiative) protocol into the COUNTER Code of 
Practice.

- New reports that enable vendors who provide journal archives as 
a separate acquisition from the current journals to meet the 
requirement that the usage of such archives must be reported 
separately.

- New library consortium usage reports. The advent of the SUSHI 
protocol greatly facilitates the handling of large volumes of 
usage data, which is a particular advantage for consortial 
reporting. For this reason COUNTER has developed two new reports 
for library consortia that are specified only in XML format.

- A new optional additional report; Journal/Book Report 1: Number 
of successful full-text item requests by month and title, 
specified in XML only, will allow vendors that provide online 
journals and books on the same platform to report usage of both 
categories of product in a single COUNTER report.

- A new protocol that allows federated searches to be isolated 
from dedicated searches of single databases or services.

- New protocols that require activity generated by internet 
robots and crawlers, as well as by LOCKSS and similar caches, to 
be excluded from the COUNTER reports.

- 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. COUNTER is actively supported 
by the international community of librarians, intermediaries, 
publishers and vendors, and by their professional organisations. 
For more information visit http://www.projectcounter.org

For more information, please contact:

Peter Shepherd
Project Director - COUNTER
pshepherd@projectCounter.org