The COUNTER reports which provide us with use statistics for our databases, ejournals and eBooks are changing this year.

Since 2012 we have been receiving COUNTER release 4 reports.   In 2019, a new version, release 5, will replace COUNTER 4.   Release 5 has been developed to meet changing reporting needs and the focus has also been on making things simpler and more consistent.

Fewer reports
COUNTER 4 had twenty-four separate reports, each meeting a different need.  In COUNTER 5 there are four master reports.   The master reports can be filtered and this has eliminated the need for additional reports.

New metric types
There is some different vocabulary in COUNTER 5.  Most notably, there is a new metric type called “item investigations”  and full-text usage (“PDF downloads” and “views”) are now recorded together as a single metric called “item requests.”

One of the reasons for this change is to  better describe the use of new media such as online videos.

More granular
As well as new metric types, COUNTER 5 has some new attributes that can be used for more granular analysis.  For example, there is an attribute called “access_type” which could be used to analyze a hybrid journal and find out how much of the use has been for open access content and how much for restricted articles.

Transition to release 5
At this stage, only two publishers have made COUNTER 5 reports available to us, but during the year more will making the transition from COUNTER 4 to COUNTER 5.