Benefits of COUNTER Reports in the Publishing Industry

COUNTER, which stands for “Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources,” is an international non-profit membership organization of libraries, publishers, and vendors. All the members continually develop a Code of Practice, which provides the standard for the knowledge community to use consistent, comparable, and standardized usage data. COUNTER has successfully ensured that vendors and publishers across the world are able to provide their respective customers with accurate statistics regarding various content types, including databases, journals, articles, books, and multimedia.

Originally, the COUNTER standard was created to assist librarians who buy various subscriptions for their members. The primary objective was to help them easily compare the usage of various subscriptions from multiple publishers. It helped them analyze the usage pattern of content across types, genres, fields, etc. This information was also used in order to arrive at a particular metric called “cost per download” for each subscription. It was a measure of the return on investment for a particular subscription or content piece and which, in turn, helped the libraries optimize their budget allocations.

Even though the usage of COUNTER reports by libraries was the most common, some publishers also gradually began to use them. These standardized reports are now widely used by publishers to understand usage patterns across various subscribers, geographies, demographics, etc.

In addition to providing a standardized set of reports on usage information, COUNTER assists librarians and publishers by

offering subscription renewal information
tracking the value of library resources
analyzing and enhancing user behavior
providing comparable usage statistics to customers
informing authors about the usage of their publications.

COUNTER Benefits

Tracking Usage: Usage data is generated using two approaches:

Page tags are small JavaScript codes that are embedded within every page of a website. Information is gathered from these codes and compiled in a database. This data can give additional information about content users, enabling publishers to gauge their customers’ navigation, or buying behavior.

Log files represent individual HTTP requests, IP addresses, browser information, request dates and times, and so forth. Log files are stored on clients’ servers, enabling them to use any analytic program to receive consistent results. Additionally, they are independent of their customers’ browsers, ensuring that publishers can reliably track any data for COUNTER reporting.

Data Processing: COUNTER ensures that only valid page requests are counted and that any bad requests are excluded. Only relevant content types, such as books or their supplementary files, are counted, not images or style sheets.

Comparable Reports: Since the definitions of collecting the usage statistics are standardized, the COUNTER reports are independent of any vendor-specific formats and can be compared across different service providers.

Portable Formats: As part of the standardization, report formats are strictly defined and adhered to, and can be easily used by different data analysis tools.

MPS can help you become compliant with COUNTER 5 standards and stay updated with the requirements of librarians and publishers worldwide. Get in touch with us to know your online content usage. MPSInsight is a COUNTER 5 compliant Business Intelligence tool that is capable of generating not just COUNTER reports but also, various customized reports for publishers and libraries.