Project COUNTER

Project COUNTER
Name	Project COUNTER
Founded	2003
Headquarters	London

Project COUNTER

Project COUNTER is an international initiative that develops technical standards and a Code of Practice for counting usage of electronic resources in libraries and publishing. It provides a framework used by librarians, publishers, vendors, consortia and research institutions to report consistent and comparable usage statistics for journals, books, databases and multimedia. The project interacts with standards bodies, research funders, library associations and major commercial publishers to harmonize metrics across platforms.

Overview

Project COUNTER produces standardized usage reports adopted by stakeholders including JSTOR, Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Taylor & Francis, Sage Publications, ProQuest, EBSCO Information Services, Gale, Clarivate, Wiley Online Library, BioMed Central, IEEE Xplore, Nature Publishing Group, Cambridge University Press Digital Library, Project MUSE, SciELO, Hindawi Limited, De Gruyter, SAGE Journals Online, Karger Publishers, Ingenta, Portico, LOCKSS Program, Digital Science, Crossref, ORCID, COUNTRY consortia and national libraries. The standards aim to make usage counts comparable across platforms and compatible with metrics produced by Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, PubMed Central, DOAJ, ERIC, WorldCat, HathiTrust, OpenAIRE and institutional repositories. Libraries at institutions such as Harvard University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Stanford University, MIT, University of California, Yale University, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Toronto, McGill University, University of Melbourne, University of Tokyo, Peking University and National University of Singapore rely on COUNTER-compliant reports for collection management, licensing negotiations and assessment.

History and Development

Project COUNTER was initiated in 2002–2003 through collaboration among representatives from publishing houses, library consortia and standards organizations, influenced by earlier work from NISO, UKSG, JISC, RLUK, SPARC, ARL and national library initiatives such as British Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France. The first Code of Practice addressed journal article downloads and database searches; subsequent releases expanded coverage to books, multimedia and institutional repositories. Major revisions reflected consultations with stakeholders including OCLC, EDUCAUSE, ICOLC, SPRUCE, SERU, COAR, CrossRef, ORCID, DataCite and funders such as Wellcome Trust, UK Research and Innovation, European Commission, National Institutes of Health, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Standards harmonization involved coordination with technical working groups from ISO, IEC, W3C, COUNTER Release Board and national metrics pilots in countries such as United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, China and Brazil.

COUNTER Code of Practice and Standards

The Code of Practice defines report types, data elements, filtering rules, and reporting periods used in standardized reports such as the Journal Report, Book Report, Database Report and Platform Report. It specifies how to treat robotic accesses, proxy services like OpenAthens, Shibboleth, EZproxy, and content delivery networks operated by companies such as Amazon Web Services, Akamai Technologies and Cloudflare. The Code refers to identifier schemes and metadata standards including DOI, ISSN, ISBN, Handle System, ORCID, DataCite DOI and CrossRef metadata. Technical implementation guidance draws on log analysis techniques familiar to practitioners of COUNTRY analytics, and interacts with authentication systems used by institutions like Cornell University, ETH Zurich and University of Edinburgh.

Implementation and Compliance

Vendors implement COUNTER through server-side reporting, log-file exports, APIs and batch reports integrated with library systems such as Ex Libris, OCLC WorldShare, SirsiDynix, Koha, Alma, Voyager and discovery services like EBSCO Discovery Service and Primo. Compliance is assessed via audits and validation tools developed with partners including Jisc and NISO, and timelines for adoption have been influenced by procurement policies at consortia such as California Digital Library, HathiTrust, SERSCIDA and national negotiation agencies in Germany and France. Vendors and publishers provide COUNTER-compliant reports to institutional librarians for use with analytics platforms including SUSHI API, Google Analytics, Tableau, Power BI, Kibana, DASH and institutional research offices.

Usage Metrics and Reports

Key COUNTER reports include Total Item Requests, Unique Item Requests, Investigations, Successful Requests, and Platform Usage, mapped to resource types tracked by DOI, ISSN, ISBN and database identifiers. Libraries use COUNTER data alongside citation databases like Scopus and Web of Science and altmetrics providers such as Altmetric and PlumX for collection assessment, cost-per-use calculations and demonstrating return on investment to funders like Research Councils UK and National Science Foundation. COUNTER metrics inform subscription negotiations, open access analyses tied to initiatives such as Plan S, Transformative Agreements, Read and Publish deals, and repository deposit policies referenced by Sherpa Romeo and Sherpa Juliet.

Governance and Funding

Governance has involved a release board, technical committees and advisory panels composed of representatives from publishers, libraries, consortia, standards bodies and funders such as Wellcome Trust, UKRI, European Research Council, National Institutes of Health and philanthropic organizations. Funding and administrative hosting have rotated among organizations and been supported by membership fees, sponsorship from commercial publishers like Elsevier and Springer Nature, grant awards from entities such as Jisc and in-kind contributions from institutions such as University College London and The British Library. Strategic oversight has engaged groups including NISO, UKSG, SPARC Europe, ARL, ICOLC and regional bodies across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Impact and Criticism

COUNTER has improved comparability of usage data across platforms, aiding libraries and publishers in licensing decisions, open access policy evaluation and collection analytics, and has been cited in policy discussions by European Commission, OECD, UNESCO and national research assessment exercises such as REF and Horizon 2020 evaluations. Criticism includes concerns about reliance on usage as a proxy for value raised by scholars at Amsterdam University Press and analysts at SPARC, debates over treatment of robot traffic involving companies like Google and Microsoft, and challenges aligning COUNTER with alternative metrics from Altmetric and Impactstory. Ongoing debates involve interoperability with persistent identifier initiatives such as ORCID and DataCite and the need to address privacy legislation like GDPR and sectoral rules in jurisdictions including United States and European Union.

Category:Academic publishing standards