ACS Publications announces compliance with Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15, 2009 — The American Chemical Society (ACS) Publications Division is pleased to announce full compliance with Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Journals and Databases. COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) is a global initiative serving librarians, publishers, and their intermediaries by instituting standards for reporting online usage statistics in a consistent way across multiple publishers and platforms. ACS Publications has achieved full compliance with the third release of COUNTER, the deadline of which was Aug. 31, 2009.

The highlights of this updated release include:

• Incorporating new protocols designed to mitigate the potentially inflationary effects on usage statistics from federated/automated search engines, internet robots, and crawlers
• Providing tools that facilitate the consolidation, management, and analysis of COUNTER usage statistics
• Improving the COUNTER usage reporting for library consortia
• Improving the usage report for journal archive content

The implementation of the SUSHI (Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol will further enable easy access to COUNTER compliant statistics by facilitating the transmission of COUNTER usage reports into local electronic resource management systems (ERMs).

In addition, ACS Publications is fully compliant with Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for Books and Reference Works. All titles in the newly digitized ACS Symposium Series and Advances in Chemistry series are now available online with fully COUNTER compliant usage reporting.

This online book collection includes all titles from the ACS Symposium Series and Advances in Chemistry book series. This significant content addition is fully integrated with the ACS Journals website and allows for a powerful multi-product search experience, spanning across 800,000 original research articles and nearly 20,000 book chapters. Advanced features include related content linking, personalization tools like saved searches and favorite articles, and dynamic reaction and substance links to SciFinder®.

For more information on COUNTER, please visit: www.projectcounter.org.

For more information on ACS Symposium Series Online, please visit: http://pubs.acs.org/page/books/index.html.

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. With more than 154,000 members, ACS is the world’s largest scientific society and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

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