Ringgold’s New Subject Taxonomy Now Published and being considered by COUNTER for the Journal Usage Factor

March 12, 2013 – Beaverton, OR, USA. Ringgold’s New Subject Taxonomy Now Published and being considered by COUNTER for the Journal Usage Factor.

Ringgold Inc (www.ringgold.com) is proud to announce the publication of its new subject taxonomy, Ringgold Subjects, and it is being considered for adoption by COUNTER for use in classifying journals for the Journal Usage Factor (JUF).

Ringgold has engaged with its customers to develop a suitable and granular subject taxonomy to classify the subject interests of institutions over the last year. It undertook detailed research and a lengthy consultation process with publishers, which resulted in a widely accepted subject taxonomy that meets publishers’ needs in mapping their content to the subject interests of institutions.

COUNTER has been developing the Journal Usage Factor (www.projectcounter.org/usage_factor.html) since 2007 in consultation with a large number of industry leaders, and with publishers participating in a number of project phases. The draft code of compliance for the JUF is available on the COUNTER website for the purpose of public consultation: www.projectcounter.org/documents/Draft_UF_R1.pdf.

Peter Shepherd, COUNTER Director, said “We have explored a number of subject taxonomies for the classification of journals within the JUF and have found Ringgold’s Subjects to be the best fit, with the most international approach, widest coverage and least geographical bias”.

Ringgold will be applying the Ringgold Subjects to its institutional database of over 350,000 institutional entities, by assessing their products, services, research interests and departmental structure. This is part of a larger re-classification of Ringgold’s Identify database that will be rolled out in phases over the next two years. The subject element of the re-classification has been published on the Ringgold website and is openly available for use by all: www.ringgold.com/pages/subjects.html.

For further information please contact info@ringgold.com.

About Ringgold

Ringgold has created a process for the identification of institutions and the relationships between organisations. Each institutional entity has been assigned its own unique Ringgold ID, which is mapped to the organisational hierarchy and a range of classification metadata, including consortium membership. Ringgold provides two main services, Identify – a database of over 350,000 organisations with Ringgold IDs and associated metadata, and Consortium Directory Online – a directory of over 400 library consortia world-wide which license online content, fully profiled for analysis and information regarding licensing and contacts. More than 60 publishers currently use Ringgold’s databases and its related services to organise and manage their customer data more effectively.