All about book reports and metrics webinar

If you missed our webinar on book reports, you can catch up by viewing the recording.

You can also download the slides we used in this webinar. Our answers to questions from the webinar are given below.

We have more webinars planned for next year:

23 January at 3pm GMT: Understanding Release 5 Journal Reports

20 February at 3pm GMT: Using Release 5 reports to understand usage of open access content

19 March at 3pm GMT: Platform Reports

Answers to questions from the COUNTER Release 5 Webinar, 26 November 2019

Q: What is the format of Titles using Adobe Digital Editions?

A: In Release 4 you will have seen ‘HTML’ and ‘PDF’. However, Release 5 is format agnostic. Requests for all formats are reported, but the format itself is not specified.  Total_Requests show the number of requests for all formats. Unique_Requests eliminate double counting of requests where the same item is accessed in more than one format in the same session.

Q: Which reports will librarians be using for the SCONUL reports next year?

A: This will be up to SCONUL to confirm, however as long as you are using the Unique_Title metrics you will be able to compare book usage across all platforms where COUNTER reports are available.

Q: How can I compare book usage between R4 and R5?

A: Please see table below.

Q: If a content provider delivered a book as a single PDF and, under R4, reported this at the chapter level in BR2, how can I use R5 reports to compare with R4 usage for this title?

A: For legacy reasons, some content providers were using this approach. Unfortunately, in these cases, it is not possible to draw direct comparisons .

Q: Could you clarify whether OA, for instance Gold OA, is included in the TR_BR1 report?

A: In the TR_BR1 report, OA books are excluded. Only books which are behind a paywall are included in this report. This is to make it easier for librarians to calculate cost per title excluding any OA Gold books. OA usage is included in the other reports and it is also included in the Master Report. At present (autumn 2019) numbers of OA Gold books are relatively low.

Q: For comparison purposes, would it be possible to find out which content providers were reporting single PDFs as chapter accesses?

A: At present there is no definitive list available. Two content providers who, for legacy reasons, reported in this way using BR2 were Springer and IOP. In R5 reports, the Unique_Title metric and the attribute information means this has been addressed.

Q: Is it possible to have details of content providers where it is not possible to compare directly between COUNTER R4 and R5 book usage?

A: This is a good suggestion and we are working on compiling a list.

Last updated: November 2019.