Alma Compliance with COUNTER 5.1
- Product: Alma
Alma’s support of loading COUNTER R5.1 reports, both manually and by SUSHI harvesting, is part of the February 2025 release. This is aligned with the timeline documented by COUNTER (https://www.countermetrics.org/when-r51/).
See more details in Alma February 2025 release notes.
Alma implementation
The change from R5 to R5.1 may not be as substantial as the shift from R4 to R5, but is still significant:
- The harvesting URL is different
- The structure of the JSON file has many changes, causing the parsing to be completely different
- Changes of error/warning management
- And more
Vendors are required to support both R5 and R5.1 concurrently for a minimum of 3 months, though based on past experience, this period could be significantly longer. We cannot mandate a transition from R5 to R5.1, even for vendors that support it. The shift must be driven by the customer's decision after testing and confirming their readiness to adopt the new standard.
Considering these factors and the existing Alma infrastructure, we have decided that a separate account in Alma is necessary for harvesting reports in R5.1.
Moving to R5.1
To simplify the transition process, Alma offers an option to copy the existing R5 account while only updating the URL. All other details, such as credentials and report types, will be copied:
See more details in Moving SUSHI Account Information from R5 to R5.1 - Workflow
We are also considering the possibility of allowing bulk creation of R5.1 accounts. However, this approach is more complex due to several uncertainties: How will we obtain and verify the new URL for each account? Can we be certain that credentials and other information won’t require updates? Will a significant number of vendors shift to R5.1 quickly, or will the transition be gradual?
As vendors begin moving to R5.1, we will have a clearer understanding of whether a bulk creation tool is necessary and what its structure should be.
Analytics
COUNTER R5.1 reports’ usage will be added to the current R5 folder in Analytics. It will be possible to compare usage harvested in R5 and R5.1. This is aligned with COUNTER guidelines (see "Are Release 5.1 reports comparable to Release 5 reports"? in FAQ). This is possible because the core framework of reports, metrics, and views is the same between R5 and R5.1. There are, however, specific changes that require attention – see more details in Analytics documentation.
Vendors supporting R5.1
We follow the list in https://registry.countermetrics.org/, so once vendors are officially nominated as supporting R5.1, we will add them to the list of certified SUSHI vendors. If you know about such vendors, please follow the contribute methodology so the entire Alma community can benefit from your knowledge.
- Article last edited: 11-Dec-2024