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["Gillingham Emily"@lists.yale.edu]

<Emily.Gillingham@oxon.blackwellpublishing.com>
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Subject: COUNTER Vendor Auditing Standards and Procedures now published
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- NEWS RELEASE - 

COUNTER Vendor Auditing Standards and Procedures now published

An important feature of the COUNTER Code of Practice is that compliant
vendors must be audited on a regular basis in order to maintain their
COUNTER compliant status. To facilitate this a set of auditing 
standards and procedures has been published on the COUNTER website
(http://www.projectCounter.org). In developing these COUNTER has tried
to meet the needs of customers for credible usage statistics without
placing an undue administrative or financial burden on vendors. For 
this reason audits will be conducted online using the test scripts 
included in the auditing standards and procedures.

An independent audit of all COUNTER compliant vendors will be required
within 18 months of their achieving compliance with any Release of a
COUNTER Code of Practice and annually thereafter. This audit may be
carried out by a Professional Certified Accountant (USA), by a 
Chartered Accountant (UK), or by their equivalent in other countries.
Alternatively the audit may be done by another suitably qualified
COUNTER-approved auditor selected from a list that will be published on
the COUNTER website.

The COUNTER auditing standards and procedures provide information on 
the general auditing requirements as well as detailed specifications 
for the auditing tests appropriate to the individual COUNTER usage 
reports.
  
- About COUNTER- 

COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) is a
multi-agency initiative whose objective is to develop a set of
internationally accepted, extendible Codes of Practice that will allow
the usage of online information products and services to be measured
more consistently.  Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for
journals and databases was published in January 2003 and is now widely
implemented. COUNTER is actively supported by the international
community of librarians and publishers, and by their professional
organisations.

For more information, please contact:

Peter Shepherd
Project Director - COUNTER 
pshepherd@projectCounter.org