Intota: Troubleshooting COUNTER Report Errors, and Uploading Hints and Tips
- Product: Intota
What is causing the errors when we upload a usage report into Intota?
There are a few main documents that will help you to better understand how to work with your Counter data and make changes in the data.
- Working with and Troubleshooting your Counter Data (this article)
- COUNTER Reports Page
- Uploading Counter Reports
- Report Data Details Page
Counter Errors and Warnings
Once a usage-statistics report has been uploaded into Intota, one of four validation marks will appear in the Status column on the Counter Summary page.
- Remember that a report needs to be in a supported version of COUNTER in order for the report to upload. Recent versions are supported; old versions tend to not be supported. See Intota: Supported Project COUNTER Compliant Usage Statistics Reports for details.
Validation marks include: A green arrow, a yellow pencil, a red error mark, or a blue gear icon:
Green Check Arrow: The data in this uploaded report has been successfully aggregated with your other usage data. It is ready to be viewed in the consolidated reports
Yellow Pencil: The "Consolidated Warning." The Counter data has been pushed to your consolidated reports but there may have been minor issues that were not serious enough to prevent the upload process. The most common warning is the Vendor Platform Mismatch. (See Yellow Pencil section below.)
Red Error Mark: The red error indicates the report failed the validation process. The usage data from that report was not aggregated with your other usage data in the consolidated reports. The red error mark will show within about 20 minutes if you are uploading your own Counter data. (See Red Error Mark section below.) You may repair the incorrect data and upload again. Most types of repairs can be fixed from the COUNTER Report Data Details Page. NOTE: If a report has a red error mark and was Uploaded By "Auto-Harvested" (see the second row in the image below, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., DB1), then the problem was with the SUSHI-protocol harvesting. See the Troubleshooting section below for more information about failed SUSHI uploads. You can also click the "Log" button [blue rectangle with downward facing arrow] in the Report column to verify the credentials you entered were correct.
Blue Gear: COUNTER report validation is in progress; consolidation is not yet finished.
Blue Gear: COUNTER report validation is in progress; consolidation is not yet finished.
The rest of this document is a more indepth explanation look at the various problems you may have when uploading reports. Click to jump to the section you would like to read:
Yellow Pencil (aka "Consolidated Warning")
The Consolidated Warning is telling you that the Counter data has been pushed to the Consolidated Report. There may have been some small issues with the data, but nothing serious enough to cause an error.
Vendor-Platform Mismatch: means the name of the Platform in one or more rows is not the same as the name of the provider (vendor) you chose when you uploaded the report.
For example, if you uploaded the report and chose Vendor "Ebrary" but in the report itself the Platform is listed as "ebrary perpetual," Intota will give the yellow pencil because the term "Ebrary Perpetual" may not be recognized by the uploader as a proper platform name.
However, in this case you know they do match, so you can safely ignore the mismatch and continue on to consolidated reports .
On the other hand, the yellow check mark could indicate the wrong vendor was associated with the platform found in the usage data. If the Vendor does not match the Platform, you'll need to make changes in the spreadsheet. Refer to COUNTER Report Data Details Page and upload again. This is NOT difficult to do when uploading your own usage data!
Red Error Mark
The red validation error means that the usage data was not consolidated. You'll need to make changes to the data spreadsheet then upload again. Refer to COUNTER Report Data Details Page for more information on fixing errors.
NOTE: If the file was uploaded through SUSHI-protocol harvesting in the Data Retrieval Service (DRS), see the log information to determine the cause. You can re-harvest the SUSHI report yourself from the Counter Data Details page. In the Data Retrieval Service request form, please remember to enter BOTH credentials for SUSHI and the manual upload. Our Data Retrieval Team will attempt to upload manually when SUSHI fails.
Here are some common causes for uploaded errors and solutions you can perform to repair the data problems received from the Counter vendors:
•Duplicate Titles: Same title, the ISSN appears in more than one row. If an exact duplicate (same numbers in both rows) appears, remove one of the lines and upload again "reupload." If usage numbers are different on two lines, add the totals and remove the row with the fewest numbers. See example below.
•Extra blank columns or rows: remove them and upload again ["reupload'] them from the Counter Report Data Details page.
•Formatting Issues: This happens most often if you are uploading Non-Counter Compliant data. Compare the data to our Counter Compliant data templates, make changes and upload again "reupload." Refer to the library of 360 Counter Templates in Uploading Non-COUNTER Compliant Usage Data .
Other Uploading Issues when you might alter your Counter Data
Titles with Zero Usage (Journal Reports only)
Many Counter Compliant vendors submit a Counter spreadsheet of both titles you subscribe to and titles you may not subscribe to. (Example: if you have created a selectable database of 40 out of 100 titles in your Intota profile, the vendor may include all 100 titles in their Counter JR report; at least 60 of these titles will appear as having zero usage. It's possible there is also a subscribed title that had no usage.) Thus, in your Consolidated Report, you will see Zero Usage titles for titles you don't subscribe to in addition to zero usage titles that you do subscribe to.
To make sure the titles uploaded into your JR reports are accurate, you may want to remove the titles marked "not tracked." See Counter Data Details information below.
Duplicate Usage from Hosting Provider and Publisher
It is possible to (accidentally) upload duplicate usage data for the same journal from two "vendors" when one of them is a hosting provider (such as Highwire or Metapress) and the other is the publisher.
If you look at your full consolidated usage and cost report, this will become obvious when you see two lines of the same usage data for a title: one associated with the publisher, the other associated with a hosting provider:
The solution is to add your usage data to either the publisher or the hosting provider, but not to both in your Intota profile. If you suppress one of the titles from the list of journals in your Intota profile the title will not show any usage.
Platform Changes
When a platform name changes, your library will need to make a decision about whether to have the old usage reports talk or not talk to the new ones, or to re-load costs and usage statistics so they're all associated in the consolidated report. If you don't, they will appear on separate lines, one for each platform name.
When a platform name changes, your library will need to make a decision about whether to have the old usage reports talk or not talk to the new ones, or to re-load costs and usage statistics so they're all associated in the consolidated report. If you don't, they will appear on separate lines, one for each platform name.
You can delete the report associated with the old platform name, and then upload again or "re-upload" the new information and associate it with the new name.
Duplicate Statistics for the Same Title in one Report
It's not unusual for a vendor to repeat the same Journal title which will result in an error. The Data Retrieval Service will remove one of the titles and upload again or "re-upload" the report for you. However, a duplicate line of data will cause a SUSHI report to have an error. Refer to the Counter Data Details page section below where you can locate duplicate titles and remove them yourself.
NOTE: If statistics are the same in both lines (or title entries), remove one of the lines. If the numbers are different, total the numbers and then remove one of the lines. Upload your data again or "re-upload" to complete the process.
Overwritten Counter Reports
- Each time you upload a report in the same Project COUNTER-compliant format (JR1, JR2, DB1, DB2, or DB3) from the same vendor as a previous upload, Intota will overwrite the old report with the new data for any months the reports have in common. For instance, if you initially upload reports with data from the first few months of the year, and then later (perhaps early the next year) you upload a report with the entire previous year of data, the first report will be overwritten.
- If you upload a report that has the same "Run Date" (that is, the date the vendor ran the report) as a previously uploaded report, the first report will not be visible on the 360 Counter home page, so you won't know if it was uploaded successfully or had errors. The solution for this is fortunately easy: Before you upload the reports, open one of the reports (in Excel or a similar program) and change the Run Date to be a day or two different than the other report.
- Intota does not overwrite an existing usage statistics report if the same file is currently being processed or if it is locked due to a simultaneous upload.
Counter Report Data Details Page and Functionality
The COUNTER Report Data Details page allows you to view and work with your Counter data. Clicking on a report link on your COUNTER Reports page takes you to the data for that report.
- Date Created: 6-Jun-2014
- Last Edited Date: 12-Jun-2015
- Old Article Number: 10851