MDPI, the largest fully Open Access (OA) publisher, today announced its inclusion in the COUNTER Registry. MDPI is now committed to providing usage reporting across its entire journal portfolio. These reports will help academic institutions and consortia to better assess their research impact and purchasing decisions, while supporting informed discussions about the benefits of OA publishing.

The latest COUNTER Code of Practice, Release 5.1 (R5.1), provides international standards and protocols to ensure consistent, credible, and comparable usage statistics across online scholarly resources. Optimized for OA, the update supports Global Item Reports, which detail the total global usage across individual content items like journal articles. These insights showcase the international reach and visibility that can be achieved when barriers to research access, such as subscription paywalls, are removed.

MDPI will now provide Platform, Title, and Item Reports, with Standard Views offered at the Institute and Consortia levels. For Institute and Consortia reports, institutions must have validated IP ranges to enable usage attribution. Reports provided by MDPI will cover usage from January 2024 onwards, and each report will be made available four weeks after the monthly reporting period.

"We're delighted to see born-OA publishers engaging with COUNTER, said Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Executive Director at COUNTER Metrics. "Our normalised usage metrics are relied on as the basis for credible return-on-investment calculations by libraries worldwide. By adopting the COUNTER standard, MDPI is showing that they want to be measured against the same yardstick as other publishers."

“COUNTER 5.1 compliance reflects MDPI’s continued efforts to provide the best support for our affiliated scholars and institutions, said Becky Castellon, Institutional Partnerships Manager at MDPI. "Through these usage reports, our global research community can access trustworthy data about how their work is being used and accessed. This information is often vital for reviewing publishing partnership agreements and for making informed decisions about future funding allocations.”

“Publishing in OA is a long-term investment in openness and research impact,” continued Castellon. “In line with COUNTER’s recommendations, we believe that tracking long-term trends is the best way to ensure a fair assessment of OA cost per use. When used in this way, alongside other industry-standard metrics like citations, COUNTER 5.1 reports can become valuable resources for measuring the global impact of OA.”

Further Information

Registered institutions can request and download MDPI usage reports via SuSy, the publisher’s online submission system. For further information about SuSy: Advancing Research Integrity with SuSy Innovations.

The COUNTER API (formerly sushi) is also available for automatic report harvesting. Further information about accessing the reports is listed in the COUNTER Registry, and users are encouraged to contact counter@mdpi.com for support.

About COUNTER

Founded in 2003, COUNTER is a not-for-profit organization that aims to develop global standards for measuring and reporting content usage through normalized metrics. The resulting Code of Practice continues to evolve with the changing nature of online scholarly content and to meet the needs of librarians, consortia, publishers, aggregators, and other key stakeholders.

About MDPI

Headquartered in Switzerland, MDPI is a fully Open Access publisher with a portfolio of more than 475 journals across all scientific disciplines. To date, MDPI has published the works of over 4.2 million researchers, collaborating with an extensive network of academic institutions and scientific societies worldwide. Above all, MDPI is committed to ensuring that high-quality research is freely accessible to readers across the globe.

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