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Tasha Mellins-Cohen Named as COUNTER's New Project Director

Tasha Mellins-Cohen Named as COUNTER's New Project Director

January 2022

NISO Member News

United Kingdom | January 11, 2021

COUNTER has provided the standard that enables the knowledge community to count the use of electronic resources in a consistent, credible and comparable way since its foundation in 2003.  Lorraine Estelle has been COUNTER Project Director since 2015 and will be retiring in April 2022.

Following a rigorous search process with a large number of quality applications received from around the world, the COUNTER Board is delighted to announce that Tasha Mellins-Cohen will be appointed as the new Project Director.

Tasha has worked very closely with COUNTER for a number of years and has been actively engaged on a range of committees including the Executive Committee and the Technical Advisory Group.  She has significant relevant experience, having worked with publishers, vendors, libraries and standards bodies.  She combines the capacity for a strategic vision with the ability to be hands-on which are essential in a small, but critically important organisation that achieves its goals largely through volunteer support.

Commenting on the appointment, Anne Osterman, Chair of the COUNTER Board, said, “There are large-scale shifts underway in information resource production and management, such as the growth of Open Access and increasing demand for contextualizing usage.  COUNTER has a critical role to play, and I’m thrilled that we’ll have Tasha, with her deep expertise and extensive experience in this field, leading the community forward.”

David Sommer chairs the COUNTER Executive Committee added “I’m really excited that Tasha will be leading COUNTER over the coming years as we develop the Code of Practice in line with what our community needs.  Tasha has a unique range of skills and will help make COUNTER more useful to more people that rely on the work we do.”

Tasha commented “Over the last few years Lorraine and the whole volunteer team have made significant progress in developing the COUNTER Code of Practice and its associated tools to bring them into line with the needs of our scholarly communication community. I am looking forward to collaborating with our volunteers, the membership, and other interested parties to continue that work and ensure COUNTER remains relevant as the contexts and uses of usage data change over time.”

Tasha will start in the role in April 2022, and Lorraine will work in parallel with Tasha during a short transition period to ensure a smooth handover.