5 July 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 are 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 (https://www.projectcounter.org/community-consultation-for-counter-release-5-1/) and is also available on GitHub.
As with all significant releases of the CoP, Release 5.1 is subject to community consultation: you can respond in the following ways:
- Through the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Project-Counter/Consultation_5.1/wiki
- Through the Google form: https://forms.gle/v1QeA9rSSiyv9jgk8
- By emailing COUNTER's Project Director (Tasha Mellins-Cohen): tasha.mellins-cohen@counterusage.org
The consultation will be open until Monday the 5th of September 2022.