COUNTER Conference and AGM 2025

While APIs have made it easier for libraries and publishers to access, use and innovate with usage data at scale, time and resources are still required to manage and link usage data metrics coming from multiple platforms in multiple formats. The community-led OA Book Usage Data Trust effort, supported by the Mellon Foundation, has explored how an open, neutral international data space infrastructure, operated in line with POSI, can facilitate direct access to usage data while reducing analytics vendor lock-in and improving usage data discovery and transparency. Presenters will share updates about the transition of the usage data sharing focused access management service to OPERAS-EU. Attendees will learn about the minimum viable data space proof of concept focused on the direct exchange of COUNTER item-level views and downloads data, piloted in 2025 by JSTOR, LibLynx, Michigan University Publishing, Punctum Books, and Knowledge Unlatched. Lessons learned about the value generated by data space participation will be shared to consider how a data space for scholarly communications could be extended to support a marketplace where organizations could advertise, request, and turn on direct data connections for impact related data feeds across the array of global platforms and services in the research ecosystem.

Extrica recently implemented a new usage reporting service (ORCA from Scholarly iQ) which allowed us to report COUNTER processed metrics for our Open Access Science Journals. The service allowed us to have a fast, simple and no fee implementation using Extrica Manager for content creation and Zaraz data collection from Cloudflare.

The reporting service provides us Unique and Total Item Requests for Items, Titles, Subjects, Authors, Organisation, Organisation Type ,Country and an Item Master Report, as well as the ability to run deeper analytics of these.

We would be happy to share with the COUNTER conference our use of this data as well as some of our initial successes including:
· Item level analytics of over 5,000 articles across 18 titles
· COUNTER processed metrics for over 23,000 Unique Item Requests
· Global reach across 146 countries
· Attribution to over 2,000 educational organisations and a further 5,000 businesses worldwide (not including hosting and ISP providers)

All in the first month.

We are now working with this data to better understand which organisations are best suited as new supporting organisations for our commitment to science progress and discovery, as well as to support our conference series with trusted data as to which subjects, researchers and organisations are driving innovations in specific fields.

We hope this is of interest to the COUNTER conference and will provide valuable insights to attendees as to how Extrica is using usage data to drive our growing business and services.

The Validation Tool is an essential piece of technology. COUNTER has invested in a substantial rebuild of the tool, making it more robust and easier to use. In this presentation, the newest version of the COUNTER Validation Tool will be introduced. It features a completely new user interface while providing results backwards-compatible with the previous version. Other new capabilities, such as interaction over an API and the possibility to easily install private copies of the Validation Tool, will be demonstrated as well.

The COUNTER standard has solved a major problem of disparate metrics between the platforms, reducing the myriad of metrics at the turn of the century down to twelve in the latest release. But still, which metric, particularly of the six for usage, should you use for your analysis? The best answer to this question may be…That depends. In addition to purpose, numerous factors would affect the metric selection, including conditions where the resources you are comparing provide different metrics. Using the Friendly Guides as a foundation, we will provide an overview of what each metric actually measures, a discussion on the kinds of questions that COUNTER metrics can best answer, and a solution we use to help with the problem of analyzing resources that provide different metrics. We will also share our "Highest and Best Usage Metric" decision tree that ranks our preferred metrics for each format. Finally, we will provide a discussion of several use cases in which metric selection figured prominently. We hope to share our experiences with this still perplexing problem, as well as learn from others.

SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online) is a research communication infrastructure program that operates progressively within the Open Science framework. The program operates according to a publication model adopted in 17 countries that form the SciELO Network. Launched in 1998, the platform comprises the SciELO Preprints Server, the SciELO Brazil Collection of journals, the SciELO Data repository of research data underlying the texts, and the SciELO Books Collection. In 2025, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the SciELO Network, the program was synthetized by the motto "Open Science with IDEA" – Impact, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility. The platform’s core is its journal collection, which has indexed 413 journals over 27 years, with 325 active journals in 2025. Accesses to the platform’s communication objects are measured through COUNTER metrics, helping SciELO monitor the adoption of Open Science with IDEA. This presentation will describe how the COUNTER Code of Practice is applied in SciELO operations, focusing on access to SciELO Brazil articles. In 2024, its repository of over 520,000 documents recorded a daily average of over one million accesses. Accesses are categorized by thematic areas, publication languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, or combinations), and country of origin.