COUNTER is a widely accepted standardized way of counting usage. Starting October 15, 2025, Michigan Publishing started supporting COUNTER 5.1, a new iteration that better supports open access reporting. Compared to COUNTER 5.0 the numbers for book and chapter requests supplied to libraries and partners by our vendor Scholarly iQ will start to look higher for two reasons:

1. COUNTER 5.1 requires that each full-book read/download also counts as an Item Request for each chapter in the book. As a result we’ll see Item Requests go up significantly.
2. We discovered that SiQ was treating all of a book’s chapter downloads as the same item when doing double click filtering. As a result, when a user downloaded all chapters of a book within 30 seconds, that would be treated as 1 Request. This was artificially deflating our Item Requests.

We have added unique chapter IDs to the historic event data and SiQ will reprocess going back to 2018, which should return the numbers to what they were in the pre-SiQ COUNTER reports for the same time period. October 15 is the target date because that’s when the September 2025 reports will be available, and they will reflect the changes to the nightly feeds to SiQ going forward. We’ve requested timing the reprocessing of the historic data to coincide so all months’ reports are using consistent metrics.