Project COUNTER is an industry initiative that provides guidelines for the measurement, creation, and distribution of online usage reports to institutional subscribers. See http://www.projectcounter.org for more information.
Alexander Street Press has made a commitment to provide COUNTER compliant usage reports to our subscribers.
The COUNTER Release 4 standards contain the following new features to improve the delivery of consistent, credible and comparable usage statistics:
Institutional subscribers without a current usage report membership may contact Customer Relations to register. You may register for the Usage Statistics Service by emailing your title and institution name to https://support.proquest.com/#submitcase.
For historical usage reports (April, 2009 through October, 2013) and current usage on Alexander Street’s legacy platforms, please visit our old stats site at http://stats.alexanderstreet.com/.
Yes, the Usage Statistics Service is compliant with Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice as stated by project COUNTER; an official audit through ABCe is being conducted in Q4 of 2013. This version of the Code of Practice is mandatory beginning on December 31th, 2013 and is the version with which vendors must comply.
The following COUNTER defined reports have been developed and are available:
Database Report 1 (DB1): Total Searches, Result Clicks and Record Views by Month and Database
Platform Report 1 (PR1): Total Searches, Result Clicks and Record Views by Month and Platform
Multimedia Report 1 (MR1): Number of Successful Full Multimedia Content Unit Requests by Month and Collection
Multimedia Report 2 (MR2): Number of Successful Full Multimedia Content Unit Requests by Month, Collection and Item Type
Each report provides a unique view into the Alexander Street Press Usage Statistics Service online usage data and is formatted to the guidelines that COUNTER has provided for Release 4.
The reports defined above detail counts of successful requests made from the IP addresses you provided on your institutional subscriber license. The usage data is confined to content-related pages including database searches, multimedia downloads, and turnaways due to not having a subscription.
Beginning January 2014, COUNTER R4 compliant data will be available for all reports above.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) - The coded format language used for creating hypertext documents on the World Wide Web and controlling how Web pages appear.
CSV (Comma Separated Variable) - The simplest form of file for holding scientific, or other, data. Data is listed in columns in a text file, each value being separated by a comma. Each new line represents a new set of data.
XLS - Excel format spreadsheet
XML (Extensible Markup Language) - A text format designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML. The XML format will make it easier for customers to manipulate and merge the reports from different vendors.
Usage reports will be updated daily with a notice sent out monthly once the previous month is completed. You must add contact information to your statistics account(s) in order to receive email notifications.
Usage activity is assigned by IP address to each account that contains that IP address. Activity will be assigned to each account if the IP address falls under multiple accounts.
Summary reports for groups or consortium with overlapping IP addresses in sub-accounts will have the duplicate usage removed.
The purpose of the DB1 report is to give a database-centric view to the activity on the site(s). It intentionally separates the platform from the databases in order to allow the users to judge the value of the database.
Alexander Street Press does have products where specific records are associated to more than one database. While these instances are not pervasive, they certainly do exist.
For COUNTER Release 4 purposes, a search to multiple databases is reflected to each database, even though the user executed a search. For the instances where a record is associated to more than one database, for the DB1 report we have followed a similar path, i.e. for records that belong to multiple databases, a Result Click and Record View for that record will be recorded on each of the databases the record belongs to. Note that this does not impact the PR1 report which contains the tally of all the Result Clicks and Record Views regardless of which database they belonged to.
We are aware that if tallying the totals for the Result Clicks and Record Views for all the databases in DB1 will possibly result in a higher number than the Result Clicks and Record Views in the PR1 report. However, we have done so for these reasons:
Keeping in mind that the PR1 report servers the platform-wide, aggregated number of Result Clicks and Record Views for our users, the Result Clicks and Record Views for DB1 serve a different, database-centric view helping the librarians, our own editorial department as well as our intellectual property owners review the totality of the data and judge the usage from the appropriate point of view.
You may register for the Alexander Street Press Usage Statistics Service by emailing your title and institution name to https://support.proquest.com/#submitcase
If you have successfully registered, there is a 24-hour period during which the service will be updated with your information.
Reports for newly registered users will be available on the first day of the following month. Visit the Alexander Street Press Usage Statistics Service Login page to run a report.
Users may change their password by contacting https://support.proquest.com/#submitcase. Password changes will take up to 48 hours to take effect.
To retrieve your password, please contact Customer Relations at https://support.proquest.com/#submitcase and provide your title and institution name.