New Features: COUNTER4 and EU VAT functionality

ingentaconnect and COUNTER4

As of now, ingentaconnect is COUNTER4 compliant. COUNTER is the industry initiative that provides guidelines for the measurement, creation, and distribution of online usage reports to institutional subscribers. It represents a single, integrated Code of Practice covering journals, databases, books, reference works and multimedia content. Registered institutional administrators can login to ingentaconnect with their credentials and select the statistics link from the administrative options. COUNTER4 offers the following key enhancements over the previous releases:

• An expanded list of Definitions in the Glossary of Terms, including terms such as “gold open access”, “multimedia full content unit”, “record view”, “result click”, as well as different categories of “access denied” that are used for the first time in Release 4.
• Enhancements of the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol designed to facilitate its use by librarians.
• New multimedia reports, which cover the usage of non-textual multimedia resources, such as audio, video and images.
• Flexibility in the reporting period for all usage reports, which allows librarians to specify a date range for their usage reports.
• A set of new optional reports that enable usage of content on mobile devices to be reported separately.

These enhancements mean that the following reports can now be quickly generated by registered administrators:

Journal Reports:

Journal Report 1 (JR1): Number of Successful Full-Text Article Requests by Month and Journal
Journal Report 1 GOA (JR1 GOA): Number of Successful Gold Open Access Full-Text Article Requests by Month and Journal
Journal Report 2 (JR2): Access Denied to Full-Text Articles by Month, Journal and Category
Journal Report 5 (JR5): Number of Successful Full-Text Article Requests by Year-of-Publication (YOP) and Journal

Platform Reports:

Platform Report 1 (PR1): Total Searches, Result Clicks and Record Views by Month and Platform

Book Reports:

Book Report 1 (BR1): Number of Successful Title Requests by Month and Title
Book Report 2 (BR2): Number of Successful Section Requests by Month and Title
Book Report 3 (BR3): Access Denied to Content Items by Month, Title and Category
Book Report 4 (BR4): Access Denied to Content items by Month, Platform and Category

Each report provides a unique view into the ingentaconnect Usage Statistics Service online usage data and is formatted to the guidelines that COUNTER has provided for Release 4.

Note that historical data for 2014, to COUNTER 3 standard, will continue to be available within the administrator area of ingentaconnect until the end of the year, but to obtain usage statistics for January 2015 onwards please go to http://www.pubtechreports.com/ and sign in with your usual administrator login details.

ingentaconnect and new EU VAT regulations

As of the start of 2015, new EU tax regulations require VAT to be charged on paid digital content at the related VAT rate of each EU country where its customers – not the supplier – are based. For example, a journal subscriber based in Denmark will pay 25% on an e-journal subscription – the Danish VAT rate – rather than the UK rate of 20%. This adds a huge potential layer of complexity to administration. We’re pleased to say that ingentaconnect was fully compliant with the new regulations from Jan 1^st 2105, so no additional work is required on the part of library administrators. Further details of the new VAT rules are available here.