If Content Can Be Read Anywhere, How Do Publishers Measure Its Impact?

The scholarly communications landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented. Researchers no longer discover and access scholarly content solely on publisher platforms. Instead they move between discovery services, aggregators, library resources, syndication platforms, research tools and increasingly AI-powered environments.

This creates opportunities to extend the reach and visibility of scholarly content but it also raises an important question: how do publishers understand usage and impact when content is being consumed beyond their own platform?

The Growing Visibility Gap

For many years, librarians have relied on publishers providing usage data gathered directly from their publishing platforms to understand how content they license is being used. COUNTER reporting has provided a trusted and consistent framework for measuring that activity.

However, as full-text content syndication via platforms such as ResearchGate and the ScienceDirect syndication initiative becomes more common, publishers can lose visibility into how often their content is being consumed on other platforms.

The content is being read, but the usage data may not always find its way back to the original publisher, and this creates challenges for everyone involved.

Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Executive Director of COUNTER Metrics, says

“Between the expansion of highly distributed open access content, and the advent of AI, the community can’t continue to rely on usage metrics that only reflect activity on one publisher platform. We need to understand how publisher content is used on syndication, aggregation and other discovery sites, and basing that understanding on the COUNTER standard allows publishers and libraries to make valid comparisons of usage patterns.”

By implementing COUNTER’s best practice on syndicated usage, publishers receive a complete picture of engagement with their content, and libraries gain reliable evidence of the value they receive from subscriptions.

Bridging the gap: How GetFTR supports COUNTER

The solution is to collect data in a way that is trusted, standardised and meaningful, which is why COUNTER remains so important. As the scholarly ecosystem evolves, the community needs ways to ensure that usage can be measured consistently, regardless of where content is accessed. If content is to be consumed across multiple platforms, usage reporting must evolve to reflect that reality.

This challenge led GetFTR to explore how it could support COUNTER-compliant reporting for syndicated content. GetFTR is a free-to-use, publisher-supported service that already sits within the entitlement workflow, enabling discovery and research tools and other services to check directly with publishers and aggregators whether a researcher has access to published content.

By extending this workflow, publishers can include their internal customer identifier within the GetFTR entitlement check response. This is the mechanism that makes everything else possible: when content is subsequently accessed on a syndication platform, that identifier enables usage to be reported back to the publisher. The publisher can then aggregate on-platform and off-platform usage at the institutional level, creating a more complete view of engagement across the board.

Dianne Benham, Product Director said

“The GetFTR infrastructure already connects syndicating publishers with syndication platforms and other discovery tools to provide entitlement checks, so it’s well placed to tackle other industry challenges such as research integrity, displaying licences, perpetual rights, linking preprint to version of record, and now supporting off platform usage”

Importantly, this isn’t about creating a whole new reporting framework. It builds on workflows and standards that already exist within the community.

A Collaborative Approach

The first implementation of this approach has been explored through collaboration between ScienceDirect, Atypon and GetFTR as part of a content syndication initiative. While the technical details may vary, the principle is straightforward: enabling trusted usage reporting wherever content is consumed.

Olly Rickard, Senior Product Manager at Atypon said

“Projects like this demonstrate what deep industry collaboration can achieve: identifying an elegant solution that builds on existing infrastructure and then delivering it. Working closely with partners across the industry to advance scholarly publishing infrastructure continues to be a key driver for us at Atypon.”

This benefits publishers who want to fully understand how their content is performing and libraries looking for evidence of value.

Ian Campsall, Senior Product Manager for ScienceDirect said

“GetFTR has become the industry standard for entitlement checks across research publishing platforms which is a clear indicator of the value it delivers. GetFTR enables ScienceDirect to verify entitlements directly with publishers that syndicate content. By including publisher customer IDs in GetFTR responses, ScienceDirect can now deliver COUNTER-compliant usage data in a format that makes it easy for publishers to aggregate on- and off-platform usage.”

Content syndication is a growing part of publisher strategies, but compiling and assessing total usage can remain challenging for both publishers and libraries.

“It’s exciting that GetFTR is able to provide the technical infrastructure to help solve this pressing issue. We are happy to support our partners in streamlining workflow and improving the efficiency of data collection.” Heather Staines, Outreach Manager for GetFTR and former Board Member for COUNTER.

Looking Ahead

Content will continue to move beyond traditional publisher platforms, syndication initiatives will likely grow and Discovery pathways will continue to fragment.This is particularly true of new AI-led discovery routes, in which publishers will have even more need for reliable, normalised metrics of the kind that COUNTER is defining for syndicated agentic usage.

As this happens, the community needs to ensure that usage measurement keeps pace with the ecosystems. The challenge has moved beyond making sure content is wherever your researcher is and enabling streamlined access to content.

The question is no longer whether content can be consumed beyond the publisher platform because it already is. The challenge is ensuring that trusted, consistent usage measurement follows it wherever it goes.