Members of the International Alliance of Research Library Associations (IARLA), alongside a number of international academic library organizations, have signed an open letter calling for the expedition to Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice.
Release 5 (R5) of the COUNTER Code of Practice will enable content providers to produce consistent, comparable, and credible usage data for online content. This allows librarians and others to compare the usage data they receive, and to understand and demonstrate the value of the electronic resources to which they subscribe.
Release 5 reduces the complexity of the Code of Practice and offers a number of improvements:
- Greater consistency in report layout and between different formats
- More consistency in vocabulary and terminology
- Fewer reports and metric types but greater flexibility to compare and combine
- Flexibility to access standard reports that meet common use cases in addition to reports that can be filtered to meet highly specific use cases
Read the COUNTER Release 5 letter
About the International Alliance of Research Library Associations
The International Alliance of Research Library Associations (IARLA) is a coalition of five of the world’s prominent academic and research library organizations: Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Canadian Association of Research Libraries/Association des Bibliothèques de Recherche du Canada (CARL/ABRC), Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche/Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), and Research Libraries UK (RLUK). The alliance formed in 2016 to collaboratively address the most pressing issues of scholarly research information management in the digital, networked age.
For further information please contact:
ARL mkennedy@ARL.org
CARL susan.haigh@carl-abrc.ca
CAUL mark.sutherland@caul.edu.au
LIBER A.Verheusen@KB.nl
RLUK david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk
