Report on the COUNTER Annual Satisfaction Survey

Each year, COUNTER runs a satisfaction survey and invites all members of the COUNTER community to take part. The survey results inform our operational plan for the forthcoming year.

This year, 19% of responses to our survey were from the UK and 44% from the USA. Other responses came from stakeholders in Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Portugal, Russian Federation, Spain, Switzerland. We aim to encourage more responses from non-UK and USA countries next year.

Responses show an overall rating of 93% satisfied or very satisfied with COUNTER’s communication. Overall 97% of respondents are satisfied or very satisfied with COUNTER.

Our members and stakeholders report that they use our Friendly Guides and attended our webinars and they rate them well. Indeed, our Friendly Guides are very popular, as these two comments illustrate:

• Examples are very useful and realistic.

• The clarity of information, and easy to search/use layout is excellent. I’m able to answer any questions I have about COUNTER 5 so far from the guide.

However, our stakeholders would like more guides and webinars. We note this point and are working on producing ‘COUNTER Foundation Class’ online tutorials. The first of these will be available from the Autumn. We will of course also create more guides and run more webinars.

Respondents to the survey made some requests and raised some areas of concern:

“More examples”
We will produce more worked examples for Release 5.

“The audit should be much stricter …”
We will be issuing date stamped logos to content providers when they successfully pass their Release 5 COUNTER audits. This will help librarians know at a glance which content providers are COUNTER-compliant. We are also creating a Release 5 validation tool, which will enable content providers to test their reports (SUSHI and tabular) for COUNTER compliance. As always, we encourage librarians to let us know if they have issues or queries regarding usage reports.

“Please continue to do all possible to help get *easy* COUNTER Release 5 Consortia Harvesting Tool set up.”
This is in progress. We are at the early stages of the build and aim to start user testing in the autumn.

“There should be a “sweet spot” of frequency of updating releases of the COUNTER Code of Practice”
We agree. Release 5 will operate under a continuous maintenance procedure to allow incremental changes to be made to the Code of Practice without creating a completely new release.

Thank you for taking the time to provide feedback to our survey. We hope you will do  the same next year.