The Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) has welcomed the adoption of Release 4 of the COUNTER standard by international publisher Springer Science+Business Media.
The implementation ensures that the journal usage data Springer is providing to higher education libraries are now compliant with the standard, ensuring comparable, standard-based measurement.
The COUNTER Code of Practice for e-Resources provides an agreed international set of standards and protocols governing the recording and exchange of online usage data. Springer is the first of the 59 JUSP participating publishers to implement the new Release 4 standard, setting a precedent for other publishers to follow suit by December 31, 2013. This will ensure that data provided by JUSP continues to be of the highest quality.
JUSP, funded by Jisc, claims to be the first system of its kind internationally that automates the process of gathering journal usage data from publishers and provides a single point of access to this data for higher education libraries.
The COUNTER standard forms the basis of JUSP, enabling access to consistent and comparable journal usage statistics.
The benefits of JUSP include immediate access to data that is verified to be COUNTER compliant, and access to the system provides economies of scale to save institutions time and money, enabling organisations to concentrate on the important task of data analysis rather than data collation. A shared approach also ensures a better quality of data than was previously achievable. Lastly, the automated usage statistics portal helps libraries to assess the value for money they are deriving from participating in NESLi2 journal agreements and other licence agreements with scholarly publishers.
