COUNTER Codes and Practices of Vendors: What They Say and What They Do Not Say

Abstract

The present study was undertaken to probe the effectiveness of Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) reports with regard to usage of journals and to learn more about the practices adopted by different content providers in generating reports. Under Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice, we closely examined reports from eighteen content providers having accounts with the University of Kashmir library. The University of Kashmir has subscription access to content from nineteen different providers through the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium of India, eighteen of which are COUNTER-compliant. We were thus able to make observations on the practices of the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, Annual Reviews, Cambridge University Press, Emerald, the Institute of Physics, JSTOR, Nature, Oxford University Press, Portland Press, Project Euclid, Project Muse, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Science Direct, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. We discuss a number of patterns among the provider set that yield ambiguous or incomplete indications of journal usage. We offer to the library community and standard-making bodies a set of recommendations to seek better practices: (1) Providers should archive and make available a minimum of three years of historical usage data in addition to the current/most recent year; (2) Counts for titles that have undergone a title change should appear under the previous name for the applicable year rather than be subsumed in the count for the current form of title; (3) Usage reports for retrospective years should be limited to the title set that was available in the applicable year; (4) Usage reports should be limited to titles on subscription with the client institution; (5) The PR1 (Platform Report 1) should be required to enable librarians to acquire useful platform-specific information, such as popularity and usability of the platform; (6) Required output formats should include both the Tab Separated Values (TSV) and Extensible Markup Language (XML) formats (and we acknowledge that these formats are now required under COUNTER Release 4); and (7) Content providers should exercise great care in communications regarding platform changes to ensure that librarians can discern usage from each platform and combine usage numbers from each when not duplicated.

KEYWORDS:

• COUNTER
• ERM
• databases
• e-journals
• electronic resource management
• electronic resources librarian

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors acknowledge Dr.Reyaz Rufai, Librarian, Central University of Kashmir, India (Ex-Librarian, University of Kashmir, India) for providing the usage statistics from databases subscribed to University of Kashmir, via UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium. It would not have been possible without his help to complete this piece of research. We really appreciate the help provided by him.