Transitioning from R4 to R5

Data in JUSP

Release 5 (R5) of the COUNTER Code of Practice came into effect from January 2019, and most suppliers provide data back to this point. However, not all suppliers have yet adopted the new standard or are providing fully COUNTER compliant reports via SUSHI. This means that for the 2019 and 2020 reporting period there will be a mixture of R4 and R5 data.

Understanding and explaining the changes

COUNTER R5 has introduced new concepts, reports and terminology. To help bring you and your colleagues up to speed we have compiled a quick guide: resources to support training colleagues and also shared templates in the Community area of the Portal (login required).

COUNTER have also produced a range of resources to support the transition:

• Manual for Librarians and Friendly Guides
• COUNTER Foundation Classes

Making comparisons with previous years

When analysing usage and evaluating subscriptions, many libraries are interested in looking at trends over time and comparing with previous years' usage.

It is possible to get usage figures that are comparable with the R4 JR1 full text article requests and BR2 section requests by using the appropriate filters on the Title Master Report (TR). COUNTER have provided guidance in the Code of Practice: 13.3 Transitioning from COUNTER R4 to R5.

Exceptions

Note that there are exceptions for certain supplier due to the way usage was counted in R4. Some suppliers appear to have very large drops in usage counts when comparing R4 BR2 section requests and R5 Total_Item_Requests.

SpringerLink is one example of this, and they have a support guide that explains why this is and how to obtain a custom metric directly from their librarian portal. See How to compare book requests in C4 with requests in C5. Note that this custom metric is unique to SpringerLink and not included in the JUSP reports.

Display of publisher, suppliers and services in JUSP

With R5 we have switched from working in terms of 'publishers' in R4 journals to 'services'. This means that there are differences in the way we refer to a publisher/service E.g. in R4 journals you will see 'Elsevier' but in R5 it will be 'ScienceDirect'.

This change also means for R5 reports we can now provide full journal usage reports for platforms such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest (when compliant reports become available).