Re: COUNTER Code of Practice Release 2 draft now available for

[kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de]

comment
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-edited-by: liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu
Date: Fri, 21 May 2004 18:26:05 EDT
Reply-To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sender: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
X-Listprocessor-Version: 8.2 -- ListProc(tm) by CREN
Precedence: bulk

The Draft Release 2 of the COUNTER Code of Practice, which has been 
approved by the COUNTER Executive Committee (which includes 
representatives from librarians, publishers and intermediaries) and 
made available for comment at www.projectcounter.org, contains an 
important statement in Section 4, Usage Reports, according to which 

"Vendors must supply all the COUNTER-compliant usage reports relevant 
to their online product categories at no additional charge to customers 
in order to be designated �COUNTER-Compliant." 

It does not say "...relevant to any particular online product for which 
they wish to claim COUNTER compliance..." So, I cannot believe it is 
just pick and choose. Furthermore, a statement that statistics must be 
supplied at no additional charge to customers does not make sense, if 
the alternative is "or do not distribute them at all". 

The statement was not yet included in Release 1 of the Code that is now 
in effect. From the development of Project COUNTER, I can understand 
why this requirement has been added only now, as some publishers needed 
some time to upgrade legacy online products and could not be expected 
to accomplish this in one go. 

The "product category" (e.g., journals, or a database, provided on a 
certain platform, perhaps also bundled together as a service) used as a 
term in the statement from the COUNTER Code of Practice cited above is 
quite another matter than the specific "plans" (different licensing 
schemes, various subject collection bundles, etc.) under which online 
products are offered to customers, so I cannot see how a vendor 
could claim COUNTER compliance for a product and refuse to offer stats 
under certain plans. There is a fundamental difference with a product 
or service not providing usage statistics because it is not yet 
technically feasible or practical (outdated legacy product lines soon 
to be replaced by others, different development time scales for 
different product categories like databases vs. journals) and a 
discriminative vendor policy to provide usage statistics under certain 
licensing schemes but not under others. 

Technical provisions alone are worthless if the Code of Practice 
doesn't include the commitment of the vendors to provide usage 
statistics as an integral part of any license agreement for online 
products. Therefore I would prefer to change the wording of section 7.2 
Licence agreements so that vendors are required to include it instead 
of merely encouraging customers to ask for it. E.g., it could state

7.2 Licence agreements
Vendors to be designated as COUNTER-compliant are required to include 
the following clause in their licence agreements with customers: ...

Alas, one probably has to accept that COUNTER which has been set up to 
"facilitate the recording and exchange of online usage statistics" and 
"to to provide a single, international, extendible Code of Practice 
that allows the usage of online information products and services to 
be measured in a credible, consistent and compatible way using vendor-
generated data", cannot enforce agreements between publishers and 
library customers and cannot stipulate specific license clauses for 
information products. 

However, I still suggest that COUNTER compliance should mean more than 
just fulfilling specific technical requirements for processes and 
statistical reports. After all, this is a "Code of Practice" and that 
should pertain not only to technicalities but also to statements of 
good practice on a more fundamental level, and in this sense COUNTER 
compliance would be seen as a self commitment also to the principle 
that all licensing of online products should come with usage 
statistics. This should stay true irrespective of whether the customer 
pays directly for the online product or indirectly in connection with a 
print subscription that is bundled with online access. 

But who should take care to ensure that this becomes a reality?

Up to now, it has been mainly library consortia who have been able to 
demand the release of usage statistics from publishers for the 
information products they collectively purchase. Understandably, 
some publishers have been reluctant to release usage statistics in 
general and to all customers, out of fear they could be used to select 
titles for cancellation. (Although this is rather foolish as libraries 
since long have used local circulation and other usage indicators in 
the print environment and click-through rates from portals and A-Z 
lists in the online environment to make decisions, and will have to 
base their decisions upon these inevitably lower local usage counts if 
publishers do not provide usage statistics.) But Consortia, in 
particular the multi-year "big deals" with their publicity and 
impressing growth in usage, gave them the relative security to discover 
usage statistics as a marketing instrument. As a result of this stats 
are now routinely provided to most libraries within consortia, but 
often not beyond such settings although publishers routinely collect 
such statistics and use them for their own purposes. 

In my view, the experimental phase is over and usage statistics are 
becoming a sine qua non for all libraries especially since more and 
more are moving to e-only for part of their collection. I believe 
that consortia administrators should now start to demand from 
publishers that they provide usage statistics under all plans, even 
outside of consortial settings. After all, any particular library that 
is a consortium member will be a single library on its own in other 
contexts. As we are beginning to see that a lot of consortia deals 
will serve libraries well in a transition period but are not 
necessarily a sustainable model for all future, we'll have to look 
for exit strategies. In my view, we also have responsibility for those 
of our members that at some point are forced to back out of a 
consortium deal. It is not acceptable that they loose not only cross 
access but also are no longer provided with usage statistics. Also, 
when negotiating a consortium for the first time, the negotiator 
should ask for current and past year usage statistics to be provided 
to all potential participants, even before entering a formal consortium 
agreement. This should be seen as an essential prerequisite for 
decision making that must be made available to all libraries in 
advance. 

Within the last 12 months, availability of usage statistics has made 
enormous progress, thanks to COUNTER, and especially thanks to the 
multi-publisher aggregators, hosts and gateways that have become 
COUNTER compliant, like HighWire, ingenta, MetaPress, Extenza, 
EBSCO (EBSCOHost) and Swets (SwetsWise). It is a shame that two of 
the big players among vendors (Elsevier and Wiley) insist that the 
rules do not hold for them and they are free to decide to which 
customers they offer statistics and to which not. 

I therefore urge the members of COUNTER from the library community 
to insist that usage statistics should be made available to all 
customers of vendors designated as COUNTER compliant, under all 
subscription plans that are offered under the relevant online product 
categories for which a vendor claims COUNTER compliancy.  

Bernd-Christoph K�mper
Universit�tsbibliothek Stuttgart, Holzgartenstr. 16, 70174 Stuttgart
- Fachreferat f�r Physik / Koordinierung elektronischer Ressourcen -
Postanschrift: Postfach 104941, 70043 Stuttgart,
Tel. ++49 711 121-3510, Fax -3502, E-Mail: kaemper@ub.uni-stuttgart.de