October 28th, 2014

ThinkLoud and Scholarly iQ Issue COUNTER Release 4 Compliant Usage Reports for ACM Computing Reviews Customers

New York, October 28, 2014—ThinkLoud and Scholarly iQ today announced that usage statistics for ACM Computing Reviews are now available using the new COUNTER Release 4 (R4) standards. These standards are the latest version of the agreed international set of standards and protocols governing the recording and exchange of such online usage data, which are used to ensure independent reporting of publishers’ usage statistics to libraries. Scholarly iQ provides reporting and data management services for ThinkLoud.

“In today’s challenging economic market, ensuring that trusted, independent reporting of usage statistics is available to libraries is critical to ThinkLoud, as this data is used to effectively demonstrate the business value of our content to subscribing institutions,” said Bruce Antelman, President, ThinkLoud. “We’re pleased to partner with Scholarly iQ to ensure ACM Computing Reviews remains compliant with the COUNTER R4 standard, which allows us to better serve the scholarly library community.”

 The COUNTER Release 4 standards contain the following new features to improve the delivery of consistent, credible and comparable usage statistics:

• · A single, integrated Code of Practice covering journals, databases, books, reference works and multimedia content
• An expanded list of Definitions, including terms such as ‘multimedia full content unit’, ‘record view’, ‘result click’, as well as different categories of ‘access denied’, etc. that are used for the first time in Release 4
• Enhancements of the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol designed to facilitate its implementation by vendors and its use by librarians
• The ability to report usage of Gold Open Access articles separately, via the new “Journal Report 1 GOA.”
• An expanded “Journal Report 2,” which includes information on denied-access content and unlicensed content, in addition to the “Turnaways” data, which is covered by earlier COUNTER Releases.
• A modified “Journal Report 5,” which reports on the usage of full-text article requests by year and by journal from a library’s acquired archival content.
• Flexibility in the usage reporting period that allows you to specify a date range for your usage reports
• A single, integrated Code of Practice covering journals, databases, books, reference works and multimedia content.