New & Noteworthy
Article Type: New & Noteworthy From: Library Hi Tech News, Volume 31, Issue 4
Lifecycle management of electronic theses and dissertations: new guidance documents from Educopia Institute
Colleges and universities are steadily transitioning from traditional paper and microfilm to digital formats for the submission and dissemination of graduate theses and dissertations. While this move from print-based to electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) greatly enhances the accessibility and sharing of graduate student research, it also presents significant challenges for the academic libraries that must preserve this digital content.
The ETD Lifecycle Management project has made available the guidance documents for lifecycle management of ETDs. The full suite of guidance documents is freely available from Educopia Publishing and can also be obtained from the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) Web site (http://www.ndltd.org/resources/manage-etds). Funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and led by the University of North Texas, in partnership with the NDLTD and Educopia Institute, the ETD Lifecycle Management project is promoting best practices and improving the capacity of academic libraries to preserve ETDs for future researchers.
Geared toward the full range of stakeholders in ETD programs from administrators to graduate schools to librarians to vendors, the guidance documents cover a range of curation topics that span the lifecycle for ETDs:
guidelines for implementing ETD programs - roles and responsibilities;
guide to access levels and embargoes of ETDs;
briefing on copyright and fair use issues in ETDs;
guidelines for collecting usage metrics and demonstrations of value for ETD programs;
managing the lifecycle of ETDs: curatorial decisions and practices;
metadata for ETD lifecycle management;
guide to ETD program planning and cost estimation; and
guide to options for ETD programs.
The guidance documents for lifecycle management of ETDs have been authored by ETD program experts from the University of North Texas, Virginia Tech, George Washington University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Pennsylvania State University and University of Arizona. The documents were edited by representatives from the Educopia Institute, the MetaArchive Cooperative and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
Download the guidance documents from: http://www.educopia.org/publishing/gdlmetd
New York 3Rs Association sponsors online discussion series: library as publisher
The NY 3Rs Association has made available recordings of its discussion series on the idea of "Library as Publisher". Currently available are recordings of the first two sessions in the series.
The first session, "Library Partnership Strategies: Library and Publisher, Library as Publisher", describing two recent library publishing pilots, was held on February 19, 2014. One pilot attempted to work with publishers to secure a textbook subscription-based solution to the high cost of textbooks, while the other pilot had libraries collaborating with faculty to produce open textbooks. What do both pilots say about the future of library and commercial publishing?
University of Buffalo Libraries was the principal investigator (PI) for a grant-funded pilot program, where SUNY libraries partnered with publishers to secure an e-textbook subscription-based solution to the high cost of textbooks. SUNY Geneseo was the PI for a grant-funded pilot program to collaborate with faculty to produce open textbooks. Both pilots have learned about the future of library publishing and commercial publishing. Dean Hendrix, University of Buffalo Libraries and Cyril Oberlander and SUNY Geneseo Milne Library shared details about the program and lessons learned.
The second session, "No More Vanity: Using Self-Publishing as Community Engagement," was held on March 25. In the pre-digital age, the notion of self-publishing was used pejoratively, with so-called "vanity" presses that preyed on aspiring authors while bringing a limited number of published objects to an equally limited market. But the Rochester Public Library, recognizing the changes and benefits made possible by digital publishing, decided to embrace its local authors by creating a "Self-Published Book Festival". This full-day event helped writers learn how to publish their book independently, and, at the same time, it created a "festival" for where readers could discover some of the Rochester area's finest self-published authors. Brown Bag discussion guests Carol Moldt, Judy Schewe and Bob Scheffel were the team at Rochester Public Library that put together this exciting event.
Forthcoming talks in the series include "Using the IR [Institutional Repository] to Document and Disseminate Faculty Papers and Scholarship", with guests Kim Myers, SUNY Brockport and Yuan Li from Syracuse University (May 21), and "Library as Publisher - What's Next for New York?" with guest Robin Peek from Simmons College (June 3).
Find the recordings on the series webpage at: http://www.ny3rs.org/i2ny/publisher/1565-2/
USA ignite, Mozilla ignite challenge and gigabit network apps
The USA Ignite Initiative fosters the creation of next-generation Internet applications that provide transformative public benefit. By engaging diverse public and private leaders, the goal is to "ignite" the development and deployment of new apps with profound impact on how Americans work, live, learn and play. As transformative, next-generation applications begin to be experienced by Americans across the country, USA Ignite has the ripple effect of driving new business opportunities and accelerating the adoption of ultra-fast broadband and software-defined networks in communities nationwide.
Specifically, their applications are focused in six areas of national priority:
1. education and workforce;
2. energy;
3. health;
4. public safety;
5. transportation; and
6. advanced manufacturing.
The organization is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with original inspiration from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation, and the team is responsible for convening USA Ignite partners in industry, academia and government to identify and share best practices and resources.
Mozilla Ignite is an open innovation challenge hosted by Mozilla and the National Science Foundation as part of the USA Ignite initiative. The goal is to imagine and build apps that show the full potential of next-generation networks. Twenty-two projects were chosen for the challenge and can be seen at the Mozilla Ignite Web site (https://mozillaignite.org/#winners), and include projects such as the engage3D Video Conferencing project.
Will Barkis, Gigabit Evangelist and former Director of the Mozilla Ignite Challenge, provides his list of the top 10 gigabit applications at: http://www.cccblog.org/2014/04/01/top-10-gigabit-apps/
USA Ignite Web site: http://us-ignite.org/
Mozilla Ignite Web site: https://mozillaignite.org/about/
Gigabit apps video Web site: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/23240
Americans' library habits and the impact of digital technologies: research from pew
The Pew Research Center released a new report in March examining the spectrum of Americans' relationships with public libraries. This elaborate typology of groups based on their library engagement - the first of its kind - sheds light on broader issues around the relationship between technology, libraries and information resources in the USA.
The findings in this report are based on the results of a nationally representative survey of 6,224 Americans aged 16 years and older - a sample that is roughly three times larger than that of previous surveys in this research series, allowing for a more complex analysis of public libraries' roles in Americans' lives today. Respondents were sorted into groups based on the results of a special statistical analysis of their engagement with public libraries, such as their library use and their views about libraries' roles in their communities. Among the major findings are the following:
Public library users and proponents are not a niche group: 30 per cent of Americans are highly engaged with public libraries, and an additional 39 per cent fall into medium engagement categories.
Americans' library habits do not exist in a vacuum: people's connection - or lack of connection - with public libraries is part of their broader information and social landscape. As a rule, people who have extensive economic, social, technological and cultural resources are also more likely to use and value libraries as part of those networks. Many of those who are less engaged with public libraries tend to have lower levels of technology use, fewer ties to their neighbors, lower feelings of personal efficacy and less engagement with other cultural activities.
Life stage and special circumstances are linked to increased library use and higher engagement with information: deeper connections with public libraries are often associated with key life moments such as having a child, seeking a job, being a student and going through a situation in which research and data can help inform a decision. Similarly, quieter times of life, such as retirement, or less momentous periods, such as when people's jobs are stable, might prompt less frequent information searches and library visits.
Building this typology has given us a window into the broader context of public libraries' role in Americans' technological and information landscape today," said Kathryn Zickuhr, Research Associate at the Pew Research Center and a main author of this report. Rather than describe the basic library usage of various groups, as we've done in the past, this typology pulls back to look at what traits go along with higher-or lower-levels of library engagement, and what people with certain library habits and views have in common with each other.
Surprises in the data include:
Technology users are generally library users: a common narrative is that Americans are turning away from libraries because of newer technology, but the data show that most highly-engaged library users are also big technology users. There are some indications that the most plugged-in and highest-income respondents, whom we call "information omnivores", are not as reliant on libraries as the most engaged group, called "library lovers". Still, both groups are highly engaged with public libraries and the most avid supporters of the idea that libraries make communities better.
There are people who have never visited a library who still value libraries' roles in their communities - and even in their own lives: members of the group we identify as "distant admirers" have never personally used a library, but, nevertheless, tend to have strongly positive opinions about how valuable libraries are to communities - particularly for libraries' role in encouraging literacy and for providing resources that might otherwise be hard to obtain. Many distant admirers say that someone else in their household does use the library, and therefore may use library resources indirectly.
Most Americans do not feel overwhelmed by information today, and the people who feel "information overload" the most are actually less likely to use newer technologies - and less likely to use libraries: some 18 per cent of Americans say they feel overloaded by information - a drop in those feeling this way from 27 per cent who said information overload was a problem to them in 2006. Those who feel overloaded are actually less likely to use the Internet or smartphones, and are most represented in groups with lower levels of library engagement such as off the grid, distant admirers and not for me.
A key theme in these survey findings is that many people see acquiring information as a highly social process in which trusted helpers matter," said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Research Center's Internet Project and a main author of the report. One of the main resources that people tap when they have questions is the networks of expertise. Even some of the most self-sufficient information consumers in our sample find that libraries and librarians can be part of their networks when they have problems to solve or decisions to make.
This report is part of a larger research effort by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project that is exploring the role public libraries play in people's lives and in their communities. The research is underwritten by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Download the complete report from: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/03/PIP-Library-Typology-Report_031314.pdf
Top tech information technology (IT) issues in 2014 from EDUCAUSE
The 2013-2014 EDUCAUSE IT Issues Panel has published a top 10 list of IT issues facing institution of higher education for 2014 in the March/April 2014 issue of EDUCAUSE Review Online. The Panel anticipates that "the ideas, solutions and models that have been accumulating in higher education and technology will hit IT organizations - and the institutions they serve - fast and hard".
The top 5 issues identified were:
1. improving student outcomes through an institutional approach that strategically leverages technology;
2. establishing a partnership between IT leadership and institutional leadership to develop a collective understanding of what IT can deliver;
3. assisting faculty with the instructional integration of information technology;
4. developing an IT staffing and organizational model to accommodate the changing IT environment and facilitate openness and agility; and
5. using analytics to help drive critical institutional outcomes.
The article notes that half the issues on the list are about supporting institutional changes, and the other half are about restructuring the IT organization. The article provides in-depth discussion of each issues and advice on how to address each one. There is also a table that breaks out the issues by different types of institution - community college, baccalaureate institution, public masters' institution, private masters' institution, public doctoral institution and private doctoral institution. While the top 5 issues were shared across types of institutions, there were some significant differences that were outlined in the table.
EDUCAUSE review article:
The value and impact of data curation and sharing: new research from the UK
Substantial resources are being invested in the development and provision of services for the curation and long-term preservation of research data. It is a high-priority area for many stakeholders, and there is strong interest in establishing the value and sustainability of these investments.
A recently published synthesis report aims to summarize and reflect on the findings from a series of recent studies, conducted by Neil Beagrie of Charles Beagrie Ltd. and Prof John Houghton of Victoria University, into the value and impact of three well-established research data centers: the Economic and Social Data Service, the Archaeology Data Service and the British Atmospheric Data Center. "The Value and Impact of Data Sharing and Curation: a synthesis of three recent studies of UK research data centres" provides a summary of the key findings from new research and reflects on the methods that can be used to collect data for such studies; the analytical methods that can be used to explore values, impacts, costs and benefits; and the lessons learnt and recommendations arising from the series of studies as a whole.
The data center studies combined quantitative and qualitative approaches to quantify value in economic terms and present other, non-economic impacts and benefits. Uniquely, the studies cover both users and depositors of data, and we believe the surveys of depositors undertaken are the first of their kind. All three studies show a similar pattern of findings, with data sharing via the data centers having a large measurable impact on research efficiency and on return on investment in the data and services. These findings are important for funders, both for making the economic case for investment in data curation and sharing and research data infrastructure, and for ensuring the sustainability of such research data centers.
The quantitative economic analysis indicates that:
the value to users exceeds the investment made in data sharing and curation via the centers in all three cases - with the benefits from 2.2- to 2.7-times the costs;
very significant increases in work efficiency are realized by users as a result of their use of the data centers - with efficiency gains from 2- to 20-times the costs; and
by facilitating additional use, the data centers significantly increase the returns on investment in the creation/collection of the data hosted - with increases in returns from 2- to 12-times the costs.
The qualitative analysis indicates that:
academic users report that the centers are very or extremely important for their research, with between 53 and 61 per cent of respondents across the three surveys reporting that it would have a major or severe impact on their work if they could not access the data and services; and
for depositors, having the data preserved for the long-term and its dissemination being targeted to the academic community are seen as the most beneficial aspects of depositing data with the centers.
An important aim of the studies was to contribute to the further development of impact evaluation methods that can provide estimates of the value and benefits of research data sharing and curation infrastructure investments. This synthesis reflects on lessons learnt and provides a set of recommendations that could help develop future studies of this type.
Key areas for further research include:
extending such studies to newer data centers and lower levels of aggregation (e.g. data sets);
conducting follow-up studies to track the evolution of value over time;
drilling down in the key impact areas of reuse and efficiency; and
further development of the methods (e.g. refining the questionnaires and better integrating the estimates into a single overview).
Neil Beagrie is the Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Ltd., an independent management consultancy company specializing in the digital archive, library, science and research sectors. Neil is an internationally recognized expert in research data management and digital preservation and was the PI for the Keeping Research Data Safe research projects and the international consultant to the US National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.
John Houghton is a Professorial Fellow at Victoria University's Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies. He has published and spoken widely on IT, industry and science and technology policy issues, and he has been a regular consultant to national and international agencies, including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Read/download the report (.pdf):
Clarifying the costs of curation: 4C project submits new deliverables to European Commission
The 4C project - Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation − submitted two more deliverables to the European Commission (EC) in March. Having already created a sizeable registry of open information related to digital curation costs through its "community resources" section of the project Web site, the 4C Project's vision is to create a better understanding of this area through collaboration, supporting the process of effective investment in digital curation.
Deliverable "D1.1 - Draft Sustainability and Benefits Realization Plan" sets out a plan for ensuring that the 4C initiative has the best possible chance of making a long-term difference to the digital preservation community. Author and Project Manager Paul Stokes explains that:
the most pressing sustainability issues are to keep the project's assets and resources live and up to date, so that the digital curation community and coalition members can continue to derive benefits from our work. The project hopes to create a self-sustaining body that will further the original values of the 4C project, raising awareness of the key concepts associated with the economics of digital curation and managing ongoing resources which facilitate the exchange of data about the economics of digital curation.
The second of the two deliverables, "D4.3 - Quality and Trustworthiness as Economic Determinants in Digital Curation", provides a report on the overhead, cost, intellectual input and the eventual benefits that may accrue from undergoing self-assessment or audit procedures to become a "trusted digital repository".
The report is part of a suite of case studies into indirect economic determinants under the "enhancement" work package, and "this particular report discusses costs and benefits of standards-based quality assurance associated with trustworthiness through audits and certification practice", explains co-author Raivo Ruusalepp of the National Library of Estonia.
"Quality and Trustworthiness as Economic Determinants in Digital Curation" identifies the key generic cost drivers around audit and certification, and demonstrates some of the difficulties in separating out audit and certification costs from organizational costs. It proposes that quality in all components of digital curation is a precondition of trustworthiness. Trust can be earned through reliable services that the repository provides. Trusted repository audit and certification is primarily aimed at increasing the perceived reputation of the repository among its stakeholders through publication and transparency of self-assessment results or their validation by external auditors.
Raivo adds that:
the report should be of particular interest to those putting together business cases for this kind of investment, as it identifies some of the more intangible benefits which may be derived and also includes a cost structure that repositories can use to plan and budget their audit and certification activities.
The project team has identified five methods for evaluating the quality and trustworthiness of digital repositories, ranging from self-assessment (DRAMBORA, DSA) to audit and certification by external auditors (TRAC, DIN 31,644, ISO 16363). These have been used in the following main ways:
first, to increase the trustworthiness of the repository among its stakeholder groups and ultimately achieve a better reputation for the organization; and
second, to increase the quality of repository processes being undertaken.
Trustworthiness and reputation are seen to have been enhanced through the publication (transparency) of audit results (which has become synonymous with assessment of quality).
Critical outputs to be produced within the final year of the 4C project include the Curation Costs Exchange, a Cost-Concept Model and the Economic Sustainability Reference Model. The project will use the final "sustainability and benefits realization plan", due for delivery by the end of the project, to articulate mechanisms which will enable continued access to these fundamental resources.
The consortium undertaking this project is made up of 13 European organizations with extensive domain expertise and experience with curation cost modeling issues. The project team includes national libraries and archives, specialist preservation and curation membership organizations, service providers, research departments and small and medium enterprises and is coordinated by Jisc.
The EC reviewers told the 4C team that the project was making "excellent progress", the highest achievement possible, at its first annual review which took place in Frankfurt at the Deutsche National Bibliothek on Thursday, 27 March.
The full reports for deliverables D1.1 and D4.3 may be found in the 4C Project Web site's "community resources" section, and are available for comment and suggestion at:
Full details on the 4C Project and how to get involved may be found on the project Web site at: http://www.4cproject.eu/
ToMaR SCAPE preservation management tool available
The SCAPE (Scalable Preservation Environments) Project group has released the ToMaR tool. ToMaR, the tool-to-MapReduce Wrapper, wraps command line tools into a Hadoop MapReduce job which executes the command on all the worker nodes of the Hadoop cluster in parallel, letting your preservation tools run efficiently on thousands of files. This can be very helpful with large file format migration projects.
The SCAPE Project is funded by the European Union and is coordinated by the Austrian Institute of Technology.
More information on ToMaR is available at: http://openplanetsfoundation.org/blogs/2014-03-14-tomar-how-let-your-preservation-tools-scale
A video of a SCAPE webinar on the tool and other SCAPE project videos are available on VIMEO at: http://vimeo.com/scapeproject
SCAPE Project: http://www.scape-project.eu/about/project
Keyword extractor tool AgroTagger available from Food and Agriculture Organization
The Agricultural Information Management Standards Community under the umbrella of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has made available AgroTagger. AgroTagger is a service used for indexing information resources automatically. It extracts keywords, using AGROVOC, from Microsoft Office documents, PDF files and web pages.
AgroTagger began as a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology of Kanpur (IITK) in 2010. Building on top of the popular keyword extraction engine, the team created several versions, some based on a reduced subset of AGROVOC, known as AGROTAGS (produced by partner ICRISAT), and others using the full set of AGROVOC concepts.
MIMOS in collaboration with IITK and FAO produced an application on top of the IITK tagging service by storing the generated keywords as resource description framework triples and building from this a tag cloud showing the most commonly extracted keywords.
In addition, FAO has collaborated with the Metadata Research Center of the University of North Carolina who include AGROVOC along with a host of other thesauri in their indexing and browsing tool known as HIVE.
Finally, within the context of the agINFRA project, FAO assembled an AGROVOC-based indexing package using the Maui indexing framework.
AgroTagger information available at: http://aims.fao.org/agrotagger
Webinar on AgroTagger Use Case available at: http://aims.fao.org/community/blogs/new-webinaraims-automatic-indexing-bibliographic-metadata-agrotagger-usecase
The challenges of integrating researchers in authority files: presentation and draft report
OCLC Research Program Officer Karen Smith-Yoshimura and MIT Libraries Director of Research and Brookings Institution Non-resident Senior Fellow Micah Altman presented "Integrating Researcher Identifiers into University and Library Systems" at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Spring 2014 Membership Meeting.
A number of approaches to providing authoritative researcher identifiers have emerged, but they tend to be limited by discipline, affiliation or publisher. In this presentation, Karen and Micah provided an overview of the OCLC Research Registering Researchers in Authority Files Task Group's analysis of the complex ecosystem of systems and institutions that provide, aggregate and use name authorities and researcher identifier systems. Karen and Micah reflect on the state of the practice and on the remaining challenges to integrating researcher identifiers into the systems and practices of libraries and universities, and solicit comments on the group's draft recommendations.
Key highlights from the presentation include:
Shift from academic publishing in books to journals = loss of sole-author book for evaluation: how to integrate name authority and researcher ID systems?
Scholars may be published under so many forms of names (especially when translated) that string matching is futile.
Same name representing different people requires additional attributes, especially for Chinese names.
OCLC Research task group identified seven stakeholders for researcher IDs, use case scenarios, functional requirements and recommendations.
Where are the researchers? Dispersed among different systems.
Differences between traditional name authorities and researcher ID systems: stakeholders, organization, external integration, works and people covered.
Complex environment: institutional members/maintainers overlap systems but do not necessarily coordinate. How disputed information is resolved but often unclear.
Emerging trends: widespread recognition that persistent identifiers for researchers needed; interoperability between systems increasing. Some adoption trends.
It is time for universities to transition from watchful waiting to engagement: develop outreach, future-proof systems ("authors are not strings"), use and encourage identifiers.
This work is an outcome of the OCLC Research Registering Researchers in Authority Files activity, the goal of which is to create a concise report that summarizes the benefits and trade-offs of emerging approaches to the problem of incomplete national authority files.
The presentation slides are now available for downloading or viewing on SlideShare. In addition, the Registering Researchers in Authority Files Task Group has released a draft of the Researchers in Authority Files report for community review and feedback.
Download slides from: http://oclc.org/content/dam/research/presentations/smith-yoshimura/altman-smith-yoshimura-researcher-identifiers-cni-2014.pptx
View slides on SlideShare at: http://www.slideshare.net/oclcr/integrating-researcher-identifiers-into-university-and-library-systems
Read the draft report at: http://oclc.org/content/dam/research/activities/registering-researchers/oclcresearch-registering-researchers-draft-2014-03.docx
NISO publishes revised recommendations for knowledge bases and related tools
NISO has announced the publication of a revision to the Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART) Recommended Practice (NISO RP-9-2014). The original recommended practice, issued in 2010, provided all parties in the information supply chain with straightforward guidance about metadata formatting - focused mainly on journal resources - to ensure the exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers. Building on the initial recommendations, the revision includes the more granular, complex issues that cause problems in metadata supply, including consortia-specific metadata and metadata transfer for open-access publications, e-books and conference proceedings.
The value of the KBART format is that it can be used for both human-readable and machine-readable purposes and can be a low cost approach to effective knowledge base metadata transfer for publishers, states Magaly Bascones, Data Manager at Jisc Collections and Co-chair of the KBART Working Group. Since the first Recommended Practice was issued, over 75 publishers and content providers have endorsed KBART and demonstrated their commitment to good quality metadata provision. With implementation of the KBART recommendations, users can be assured that the providers' metadata is trusted and has the required level of granularity without the burdensome task of title-by-title checking. All of the existing endorsements will go through an updating procedure to ensure conformance with the revised Recommended Practice.
"The experience of endorsing publishers and feedback from a survey of libraries and consortia identified the areas of focus for this expanded KBART revision", explains Chad Hutchens, University of Wyoming Libraries Head of Digital Collections and Digital Resources Librarian, and Co-chair of the KBART Working Group.
Historically, it has been difficult for libraries and linking vendors to obtain accurate title list data for customized consortia packages, and the new KBART recommendations encourage content providers to establish metadata feeds specific to these packages. The recommendations also address some of the unique needs for open-access publications, e-books and conference proceedings by updating some of the required and optional metadata fields included in a KBART transmission.
The KBART project will now be transferred to Standing Committee status within NISO, and the Committee will be responsible for managing the endorsement process, providing ongoing education and promotion of KBART, and maintaining the Information Hub on the NISO Web site that provides supporting materials about KBART -including the KBART Glossary, endorsement information, a registry of knowledge base supply chain contacts and background information on OpenURL and knowledge bases.
The KBART Recommended Practice and the KBART Information Hub with its supporting materials are available on the NISO website at: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart
Release 1 of the COUNTER code of practice for usage factors available
Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Usage Factors is now available on the COUNTER Web site at: http://www.projectcounter.org/usage_factor.html. It is based on well-established COUNTER standards, procedures and protocols, and its publication follows several years of statistical testing to ensure the validity and resilience of this new metric. This Code of Practice provides publishers with the protocols required to record and report usage factors for their online publications in a credible, consistent and compatible way. While Release 1 focuses on usage factors for journals, it is envisaged that its scope will be extended in subsequent releases to cover other categories of online publications.
Publishers who are already compliant with Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for e-Resources and with Release 1 of the new COUNTER Code of Practice for Articles will find it is a relatively small further step to calculate and report Usage Factors for their journals. By doing so, they will provide their authors, customers and others with a useful new measure of journal impact. To give publishers time to implement the necessary protocols, it is envisaged that the first official Registry of Usage Factors will be published in 2016.
COUNTER website: http://www.projectcounter.org
