Implimating counter

1. Implementing Counter –
the publisher’s perspective
Timo Hannay
Head of New Technology
Nature Publishing Group

2. Timo Hannay
Head of New Technology, Nature
Publishing Group
(Technical) Member of the Counter
Executive Committee

3. Why comply with Counter?
Demand from customers (including
contractual requirements)
Demonstrate usage, and hence value

4. What Counter compliance means
 At least some Counter-defined reports are
available from the publisher (among others)
 Not (usually) correct to say that all of a
publisher’s reports are Counter-compliant
 Not (usually) correct to say that all Counter-defined
reports are issued by a publisher
 So far only applies to journals (not reference
works or e-books)

5. Things to look out for in the COP (1)
 Report formats (CSV, Excel)
 Data should be available within 2 weeks of the
end of the reporting period (usually month)
 Data should be available for the current year to
date and the whole of the previous calendar year
(but no requirement to provide an immediate
archive to achieve compliant status)
 Definition of a “request”
 HTML, PDF, etc (not GIF, JPEG, CSS, etc)
 HTTP response codes: usually only 200 & 304

6. Things to look out for in the COP (2)
 Must report zero usage
 Definition of a “turnaway” (only applies when
simultaneous user limit has been exceeded)
 Double-clicks (multiple requests for the same
HTML/PDF document within 10s/30s)
 “Session” timeout default is 30 mins (but other
periods can be specified)

7. How NPG implemented the COP
www.nature.com
Document requests
and responses
Log files Optimal IQ
Main challenge is
sheer volume of
data (100s of Gb)
Password-controlled
access to reports
Reports
Institutional users Institutional librarians

8. Looking forward
 Auditing: essential to give the numbers credibility
but will impose and administrative and financial
burdens on publishers
 XML DTD: a common machine-readable data
format to supplement the common definitions
that have been developed to date

9. What publishers should do
 Comply with the Code of Practice (not that hard)
 Tell your sales force about it
 Tell your customers about it (still lack of
knowledge outside major institutions and
consortia in the US and Europe)

10. What publishers should do
 Comply with the Code of Practice (not that hard)
 Tell your sales force about it
 Tell your customers about it (still lack of
knowledge outside major institutions and
consortia in the US and Europe)