Open access publisher Frontiers has announced its migration to the new article metric platform COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) to enhance transparency and consistency in data reporting. COUNTER, established in 2002 and widely endorsed by publishers, librarians, and research institutions, offers standardized protocols for measuring and analyzing usage data for online scholarly content, providing credible and compatible statistics.
The latest version of the COUNTER Code of Practice, COUNTER Release 5 (R5), introduces new metrics and reporting requirements to measure the usage of online scholarly content, including article views and downloads. This update allows publishers and authors to measure the impact of their research more accurately and ensures consistent and reliable usage data.
One significant feature of COUNTER R5 is the display of human views and downloads on public pages, excluding bot traffic by adhering to the newer standard of Counter 5.02 (2023+) software. Although this may lead to a decrease of 17% in views and 12% in downloads, it guarantees more precise, reliable, and industry-compliant data. Additionally, geolocation data will be displayed to provide information about where views and downloads originate, ensuring consistency across article pages, researcher profiles, and other relevant sections.
The new metrics introduced in Release 5 offer more efficient and accurate ways of tracking usage. Total Item Investigations, displayed as views at Frontiers, counts every click that provides information about an article and every click that initiates its content download. Unique Item Investigations measure the information and download clicks for each article, excluding repeated ones. Total Item Requests, displayed as downloads at Frontiers, counts the number of times an article is downloaded in various formats, while Unique Item Requests focus on counting unique download clicks without including repeated clicks during a session.
COUNTER maintains the Registries of Compliance, listing publishers and vendors who have undergone independent audits of their usage statistics. Frontiers joins reputable organizations such as Jisc, Springer Nature, SAGE Publishing, and Wolters Kluwer in ensuring compliance with industry standards. This initiative allows researchers to assess their research impact realistically, leveraging accurate, transparent, reliable, and industry-compliant metrics.
As an open access publisher, Frontiers has embraced the COUNTER R5 metrics to provide authors and readers with transparent and reliable usage data for their published articles. By aligning with the latest industry standards and best practices, Frontiers enables authors and readers to gain more accurate insights into the usage of their articles, fostering a greater understanding of their impact in the scholarly community.
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