From April 1st Cambridge Core and the Higher Education from Cambridge University Press site will be updated to meet COUNTER 5.1 compliance standards. During the auditing process a technical change enabled by the new standards was identified. This technical change allows for improved tracking reliability between browser-based usage and e-reader based usage for books on both sites as well as being consistent with how other publishers are interpreting the changing standards.

Making this change will result in COUNTER 5.1 compliant usage reports appearing significantly different to those from periods covered by COUNTER 5.0 standards, so we are making institutional administrators of Cambridge Core and the Higher Education site aware so they can account for the change in newly run reports. Customers should expect to initially notice the biggest changes in Higher Education from Cambridge University Press site reports and reports relating to Open or otherwise free to access books content on Cambridge Core.

The audit process identified that ‘all title request’ reporting will be the most impacted by the change, with our test cases suggesting usage rates may appear 5 to 7 times higher than norms seen in COUNTER 5.0. Exact differences may vary by institution due to different end user habits and usage patterns. ‘Unique title request’ reporting should see negligible differences and will remain comparable to previous years.

To ease the transition and account for differences in how customers make use of their usage reports, data consistent with COUNTER 5.0 standards will be available alongside COUNTER 5.1 compliant usage data for at least 12 months (January 2025-December 2025), meaning year-on-year comparisons up to and including 2025 will continue to be possible.

Even though the change to COUNTER 5.1 will be deployed on April 1st the new usage events have been captured since January 1st, so reports covering the full calendar year will be possible from the April 1st deployment date.

If you have any questions about the change to COUNTER 5.1 standards please speak with your primary sales contact.