COUNTER is the code of practice for reporting usage of licensed scholarly content — how many times an article was viewed, a database searched, a book chapter downloaded — defined consistently enough that libraries can compare publishers. Its companion protocol, SUSHI, specifies an API for retrieving those reports automatically.
COUNTER
COUNTER exists because libraries buy content from many publishers and needed usage numbers that meant the same thing across all of them. It is a rare case of buyers successfully imposing a reporting standard on sellers, and SUSHI turned the resulting reports into an API rather than a monthly spreadsheet.
- Comparable metrics - Defined report types and counting rules, so publishers cannot each measure differently.
- Independent audit - Compliance is audited rather than self-asserted — unusual, and the reason the numbers are trusted.
- SUSHI - A protocol for harvesting reports automatically instead of downloading them by hand.
- Buyer-driven - The pressure came from libraries and consortia, not from vendors.
COUNTER is the counter-example worth holding onto when reading The State of Education & EdTech APIs. Every other market in this series shows suppliers deciding what to publish. Here the buyers organised, defined what they needed, and audited compliance — and got a machine-readable reporting API out of publishers who had no commercial reason to provide one. Where education’s buyers organised, the artifacts exist.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Education & EdTech APIs
Buyers organising and auditing compliance produced a machine-readable reporting API from suppliers with no commercial reason to provide one — the inverse of every other market in this series.
