(8 Jul 2022) 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 designed to better facilitate Open Access reporting, among other matters, and we’re now opening our work up to community consultation.
Key aspects of the CoP remain unchanged: the Platform, Database, Title and Item Reports and their derivative Views remain in place, and the metrics themselves (Investigations, Requests, Searches, and Denials) are similarly unaffected.
The primary changes we are introducing 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 is also available on GitHub.
As with all significant releases of the CoP, Release 5.1 is subject to community consultation: please get involved by responding to us in any of the ways we’ve made available to you:
- 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: [email protected]
The consultation will be open until Monday the 5th of September 2022. The consultation is quite long but there is no need to answer in detail, or indeed to answer every question, but please do invest some time over the next couple of months to ensure COUNTER Release 5.1 is as useful as possible for you and your colleagues.
Source: COUNTER
