NISO Releases Draft Technical Report on SUSHI Lite for Public Trial and Comment

Baltimore, MD - July 16, 2015 - The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is seeking trial users and comments on the draft technical report, SUSHI-Lite: Deploying SUSHI as a lightweight protocol for exchanging usage via web services, NISO TR-06-201X. This technical report proposes and describes a method of exchanging COUNTER statistics ranging from usage for a single article to a complete COUNTER report, using commonly used approaches to web services. The SUSHI-Lite technical report does not replace the SUSHI standard but rather supplements it with an alternative approach for requesting and exchanging usage.
"Librarians and publishers are well aware of how critical the SUSHI standard is for communicating measurement of electronic resources," states Oliver Pesch, Chief Product Strategist, EBSCO Information Services and co-chair of the SUSHI-Lite Working Group. "However, since SUSHI was originally published by NISO in 2007, there have been numerous changes to the online environments in which we work, such as alternative metrics, the COUNTER Journal Usage Factor, and the rise of institutional repositories and the need to measure their use. There is a need for more lightweight technologies to allow smaller sets of usage to be exchanged in real-time, and the technologies and approaches described in the SUSHI-Lite technical report can support these newer requirements. We anticipate that in time and with further practical experiences applied to it, the SUSHI-Lite protocol will become part of ANSI/NISO Z39.93, the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol."

"SUSHI-Lite supports modern, commonly used approaches to web services, such as RESTful interfaces and JSON data formats," adds Paul Needham, Research and Innovation Manager, Cranfield University and co-chair of the SUSHI-Lite Working Group. "This optional implementation of SUSHI using current-day practices also includes mechanisms for including additional filters and report attributes which support limits of scope for data and further controls for format and completeness of data in returned sets. We think that ultimately, the SUSHI-Lite protocol is much easier to implement and will help ensure acceptance of SUSHI and COUNTER by the mainstream web development community."

"NISO is soliciting users and feedback on this draft Technical Report from any organization that uses SUSHI or would like to apply it to their data transmission project," states Nettie Lagace, NISO Associate Director for Programs. "This feedback will be used to make any needed revisions to the document before final publication."

The draft technical report is open for public comment through September 30, 2015. To download the draft or submit online comments, visit the SUSHI Lite Working Group web page at http://www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi/sushi_lite/

About the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)
NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire lifecycle of an information standard. NISO is a not-for-profit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). More information about NISO is available on its website: http://www.niso.org.