The COUNTER registry – a valuable, single point of information

During a COUNTER webinar on 10 January 2022, Director of COUNTER, Lorraine Estelle was joined by Jo Lambert, Laura Wong and Bedřich Košata who introduced the new COUNTER Registry of compliant vendors to attendees. Aimed at content providers, this session outlined how vendors can communicate their compliance, and ensure that their library customers know which reports are available and how to access them.

The COUNTER registry offers a valuable, single point of information to COUNTER compliant publishers, platforms, and hosts. It includes details of COUNTER reports supplied by each provider, contact information and SUSHI implementation details, in addition to offering a place to record data issues, restatements and resolutions.

The benefits of the COUNTER registry for content providers include:

• Demonstrating a commitment to delivering standardised data & statistics
• Promoting COUNTER compliance status as an indication of quality
• Communicating how customers can obtain SUSHI details to reduce administration and support requests
• Offering a central point to communicate data issues and restatements

Whereas, the benefits of the COUNTER registry for library & consortia customers, intermediary products & services include:

• Streamlining and automating the collection of SUSHI details for greater efficiencies
• Streamlining access to information about issues and data restatements
• Helping to establish appropriate supplier contacts

Jill Morris, Executive Director at library consortium PALCI offered this endorsement of the registry:

• “Libraries and consortia look to and depend on the COUNTER registry as an accurate reflection of publishers’ COUNTER compliance and SUSHI details. The registry helps us to determine whether our publishers and content providers are meeting our needs – and publishers’ presence in the registry positively impacts our ability to make use of these important usage data services. The registry is vital in streamlining processes in gathering SUSHI information, setting expectations, and making the use of COUNTER data as efficient and effective as possible for both libraries and publishers by putting key data points into a single source.”
• Jill Morris, Executive Director, PALCI

Irene Barbers, Head of Acquisitions & Licence Management at the Central Library of Forschungszentrum Juelich reiterated the value and efficiencies offered by the registry:

• “The new COUNTER Registry is an immensely useful database for librarians responsible for harvesting COUNTER usage reports. All the necessary information regarding compliance and reports provided per publisher are assembled in the registry. It is also extremely helpful to get all the SUSHI details in one place. We can pull all the basic information we need to prepare SUSHI requests directly from the registry instead of looking it up on the different platforms. At the same time, publishers won’t have to deal with the same questions coming from different customers.”

Although the webinar focused on content providers, librarians attending the session responded with enthusiasm to the new registry.  A future session will support libraries to engage with this vital resource. In the meantime we encourage content providers to populate their entry in the registry and to realise the benefits described.

Next steps

• Watch the webinar and see a demo of the registry in action https://youtu.be/xTFAz379Yns
• If you are a publisher or vendor please contact estelle@counterusage.org so she can set up your account for the Registry. You can then submit updates for your entry.
• If you are a library wishing to be notified of the next webinar sign up to mailing list COUNTER-R5-LIB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK