Project COUNTER Wants to Hear More from You about Hidden Metrics!

With the increasing diversity of scholarly communication systems providing us with a constant influx of new ways to share information with one another, search out content and access materials, traditional usage statistics may fall short in telling the story of the value of research and scholarship – from the perspective of those conducting the research and producing the scholarly pieces, those providing online access to these works, and those using the associated usage statistics to inform collection management decisions and calculating cost per use.

Publisher’s content can be scattered across multiple platforms, including institutional repositories and scholarly social network sites as well as aggregators such as EBSCO and ProQuest, so single platform usage metrics may be limiting.  Additionally, alternative metrics such as likes, shares, tweets and citations on Wikipedia can communicate important information to both consumers and providers.

In response to the landscape changes that result in increasingly hidden usage, COUNTER is working with Information Power Limited to undertake research into a new method of reporting called “Distributed Usage Logging” which enables publishers to provide reports on “total usage” regardless of where that usage happens. Such reports could also provide more details in the emerging altmetrics field, such as shares and tweets.

At this point, COUNTER needs your help!  They’d like to discover what additional data would be useful to YOU, as librarians, institutional repository managers, publishers and vendors.  So take a moment to fill out their survey and let your voice be heard. It consists of short question and should take no more than ten minutes to fill out.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/K5HC8B3

I reached out to Lorraine Estelle, Director of COUNTER, and she provided me with some background information about the project as well as a link to the following slideshow presented at the Fall SSP Seminar on September 16, 2015 at Washington DC:

CrossRef Distributed Usage Logging Pilot from Victoria Rao, MS

For additional information about hidden usage and metrics from a law librarian perspective, check out what some of our AALL colleagues have to say:

• Assessing Altmetrics: Why law librarians (and law schools) should care about altmetrics. Mark Popielarski, AALL Spectrum, 19:2 (2014) http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Publications/spectrum/archives/Vol-19/No-2/altmetrics.pdf
• Altmetrics: How to For Using the “Invisible Metric”. Katie Brown, AALL Annual Meeting presentation, 2014 http://www.slideshare.net/KAtieBrown1/altmetrics-how-to-aall-2014
• Altmetrics: Documenting the Story of Research. Collister, Lauren B. and Timothy S. Deliyannides, Against the Grain, 28:1 (2016) http://www.against-the-grain.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/fea_collister_deliyannides_v28-1.pdf
• Telling the Story of Research: Altmetrics at Pitt. Collister, Lauren B. and Timothy S. Deliyannides, AALL2go webinar, 2016 http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Education/aall2go/webinars/2016/aallwebinar201609.html

Be sure to respond to the COUNTER survey by October 15^th!  

Your responses will help formulate developments in this area of work, and results will be shared in summary format on the COUNTER website.