First released in 2017, Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice (CoP) incorporates the concept of continuous maintenance. Thus far, changes to Release 5 have been very small. In the last year, COUNTER’s volunteer teams, led by the Technical Advisory Group, have been working on a more significant update to the Code of Practice. The update is designed to facilitate Open Access reporting, and its work is open for community consultation.
The key aspects of the CoP remain unchanged: the Platform, Database, Title, and Item Reports and their derivative Views stay in place, and the metrics themselves (Investigations, Requests, Searches, and Denials) are similarly unaffected.
The primary changes introduced are: a more consistent focus on Items (chapters, articles) as the unit of reporting, in place of the traditional focus on Title-level (book) metrics; improved definitions of access types (open versus controlled); and some significant upgrades to the SUSHI protocol and associated JSON report structures.
The full consultation can be downloaded as a Consultation document, and it is available on GitHub.
As with all significant releases of the CoP, Release 5.1 is subject to community consultation: please get involved by responding in any of the ways are given below:
• Through our GitHub repository: https://github.com/Project-Counter/Consultation_5.1/wiki
• Through our Google form: https://forms.gle/v1QeA9rSSiyv9jgk8
• By emailing our Project Director: tasha.mellins-cohen@counterusage.org
The consultation will be open until Monday, September 5, 2022. The consultation is quite long, but there is no need to answer in detail or indeed to answer every question. But please invest some time over the next couple of months to ensure COUNTER Release 5.1 is as useful as possible for everyone in the community.
Click here to read the original press release.
