Dear Colleagues

The content providers who are working on the implementation of Release 5 have raised several issues. To resolve these, we are making some amendments to the Code of Practice Release 5. We will publish the updated Code of Practice and a Change Log shortly. However, to ensure that you are fully updated, below is the list of key amendments that we shall be making:

Unique_Titles

The Unique_ Totals metric is only intended for Book Metrics and need not be calculated for other Data_Types as they are not meaningful metrics.

Do denials count as investigations or do only successful investigations count?

Only successful Investigations must be counted. Please note that one user action might result in both a Denial and an Investigation being counted when access to full text is denied (Denial) and the user then is redirected to an abstract (Investigation).

Link outs

Given the definition of 'Investigation' in the Glossary and the requirement for a return code of 200 or 304 for something to be counted, clicks such as those required for ILL or Link Resolvers should not be counted. Even if they could be counted as Investigations within current guidelines, doing so would result in double counting - one count at the referring database and a second at the hosting platform - which breaches one of COUNTER's core principles.

COUNTER will look at the possibility of extending the Code of Practice to include link out (and maybe also link in) metrics once R5 has been rolled out.

Access_Type and YOP in Database and Platform Reports

Access_Type and YOP attributes and the corresponding filters will be removed from the Master Database and Master Platform Reports, because of the problems they cause with the Searches metrics.

There will be no changes for the Access_Type and YOP attributes and the corresponding filters in the Title and Item Reports.

Host_Type Full_Content_Database

We will add a Host_Type Full_Content_Database for non-aggregated full

content databases, i.e. databases that are a collection of content items

that are not otherwise part of a serial or monograph (so they cannot

support Title Reports for Journals or Books). An example is Cochrane

Library. This will make it easier to distinguish the different types of

content providers in terms of reporting Data_Type:

For the Host_Type Full_Content_Database

Investigations and Requests must be reported with Data_Type Database.

For the Host_Types Aggregated_Full_Content and A&I_Database

Investigations and Requests must be reported with the title-level Data_Types (e.g. Journal for a journal article).

This applies to all reports that must be provided.

Double-clicks for Searches

Double-click filtering applies to all Metric _Types except for searches.

We welcome any comments you may have regarding these amendments.

Kind regards

Lorraine