1. COUNTER: towards reliable vendor usage statistics Progress to date (April 2003 - March 2004) Richard Gedye Chair COUNTER UKSG Conference, Manchester, March 2004

2. Summary COUNTER Code of Practice released January 2003 Which vendors are now compliant? What issues and challenges has compliance raised? Results of library and vendor research Auditing COUNTER Code of Practice Release 2 Priorities for 2004 and beyond

3. Compliant vendor growth Compliant vendors Jan 2003: 2 Compliant vendors Dec 2003:12 Compliant vendors Mar 2004:25 43% of annual total of new articles covered by ISI now come from COUNTER compliant publishers.

4. Compliant vendors at 17 March 2003

5. Achieving compliance - hurdles and issues Cost of development Concern re fulltext request count reductions Need for more guidelines e.g. searching, sessions, timeouts, overlapping IPs Need for a Guide to interpretation of COUNTER reports? Like National Rail or BookScan

6. Testing the COP via market research Library Focus Groups:- San Diego 14 September 2003 London 16 September 2003 Elsinore23 October 2003 Charleston 6 November 2003 International Advisory Board Round Table, London Dec 2003 Library pilot testing programme from February 2004:- Cornell University Cranfield University GlaxoSmithKline University of California University of Leicester le

7. What the market research has told us PUBLISHERS If you want to maximise compliance, dont make it excessively complex, demanding, and expensive - and dont keep changing it! LIBRARIES Keep reports simple and basic Postpone development and implementation of Release 2 till we have more feedback on Release 1 Put future releases in draft form on the web for a period of public comment

8. What the market research has told us Level 2 reports, especially Journal Report 3, contain too much data to be useful Two levels of compliance are unnecessary Add a Publisher column (helpful with aggregator reports) Allow removal of zero usage journals in aggregator reports Divide glossary into 2, separating terms used in the reports from the rest One report per file please No punctuation in data ISO date format

9. What the market research has told us Preconstructed reports preferred to on the fly. One user found only 25% of usage reports generated live actually worked. Consortia need a way to derive an aggregated summary report cf. compiling it institution by institution. Make clearer the protocols for measuring usage when intermediaries are involved

11. What the market research has told us Feedback from the pilot test sites Feb 2004 meeting held to plan objectives and modus operandi. Early results:- Some differences between compliant submitted reports and actual ones (e.g. different number of columns, ISSNs with leading zeros missing) Difficulties locating and identifying COUNTER reports amongst others Lack of historical data for comparison limits usefulness initially Problem of knowing when compliant data starts. Add Compliant from column to the register For more feedback, attend the Using COUNTER statistics workshop at this conference

12. What the market research has told us Provide a toolkit to allow customers to combine usage statistics from different vendors automatically Issues Role of COUNTER cf agents, library systems suppliers, and libraries themselves. Role of XML DTD (machine readable) Develop a separate COP for e-Books and reference works Audit is critically important – should be credible but not so rigorous it causes publishers to raise prices

13. Auditing Auditing by a Chartered Accountant (UK), a Certified Professional Accountant (USA), or its equivalent elsewhere, or by another, suitably-qualified COUNTER-approved auditor, will be required to validate the usage reports Auditing principles have now been agreed Draft test scripts have now been written and are being discussed by the Audit Task Force with professional feedback from Deloitte & Touche and others RFPs for other COUNTER-approved auditors ready to go out to candidates once scripts finalised. Taken longer than anticipated – complexity revealed as scripts written

14. COUNTER COP Release 2 Will be published April 2004 in draft and placed on the website for six months for comment Will contain a list of specific questions for which we would like responses, in addition to comments on the changes from Version 1 Final version Jan 2005 and valid version Jan 2006. More prescriptive re formatting Make changes minimal cost as far as possible A new Journal Report 1a, which reports usage statistics for html and PDF full-text requests separately, but with health warning. A Table of terms and definitions specifically relevant to the Usage Reports contained in Release 2.

15. Priorities for 2004 Publish draft of Release 2 Solicit feedback on Release 2 draft Implement auditing Publish e-Books draft COP mid 2004 Encourage and assist growth in compliance Recruit more members

16. COUNTER Membership Member Categories and Annual Fees Publishers/intermediaries: £500 Library Consortia: £333 Libraries: £250 Industry organization: £250 Library affiliate: £100 (non-voting member) Benefits of full membership Owner of COUNTER with voting rights at annual general meeting, etc. Regular bulletins on progress Opportunity to receive advice on implementation

17. Membership at March 2004 Members March 2004:120 Vendors35% Libraries28% Consortia25% Industry Orgs10% Lib affiliates2% Join us too and help influence the future development of usage reporting standards

18. For more information………. http://www.projectcounter.org/member.html Thank you! Richard Gedye (Chair) rgedye@projectCounter.org