OAeBU Data Trust | Apr-June 2020 Update
Christina Drummond
Greetings:
As Program Officer for the OA eBook Usage Data Trust, I will be providing quarterly project updates. Please don't hesitate to contact me or PI Kevin Hawkins should you have any questions.
Best regards,
-Christina
Open Community Calls to Action
- Individuals are invited to join our stakeholder communities where we will ground the trust’s development in user-based design. Conversations have already begun to illuminate use-cases across presses, platforms, and publishers. Join and/or help us spread the word. Group Opt-in Form
Growing our Community
We’ve been working to get the people and mechanisms in place to foster fruitful, in-depth conversations from a wide variety of perspectives during this project.
Project team staffing was completed:
Data Scientist and Product Manager roles were hired at Curtin University.
The Program Officer (yours truly) began to manage outreach, communications, and community building efforts.
As referenced above, six community groups and two working groups were configured in Google Groups to provide a way for any individual to inform the work of the project’s Advisory Board, Technical Advisors, and project team through facilitated discussion. Invitations to join the groups were sent to over 80 individuals either directly or through the OAeBU Data Trust lists for Announcements, the Advisory Board, and the Technical Advisory Group. In addition, invitations were shared to OASPA, LPC, and AUPresses listservs. Thus far, forty-six individuals have opted into the discussion groups adding perspectives beyond those on our advisory boards.
This quarter, virtual presentations on the OAeBU Data Trust and our open call for participation occurred at Open Publishing Fest, the Force 11 Open Source Community Call and invited talks at BISG’s Metadata Advisory Group and Crossref’s Book Advisory and Platform and Services Groups.
Session proposals are in development or have been submitted for the DLF Fall Forum, OASPA Online Conference, and Charleston Conference. If you know of other venues we should be submitting panel proposals at this time, please let me know at christina (at) educopia.org.
Technical Developments
During this pilot project, a handful of partner organizations will work directly with our technical team to pilot public/private usage data trust ingests and outflows in terms of data visualization and reporting. Since partner selection will have a direct impact on the trust’s infrastructure development and on what will be available for 2021 demonstrations, the selection process is being conducted with guidance from our project’s advisors.
Our Technical Advisory Group (TAG) was asked for the types of diversity that should be reflected among pilot dashboard partners (e.g. geographic region, OA book languages, data-granularity, usage rates, public/private data sources).
Based on responses received, the project’s technical team is preparing a list of potential dashboard pilot partners for the Advisory Board to consider given the diversity priorities.The Advisory Board will be presented with a short list of pilot project partners for approval, after which the technical team will reach out to confirm partner availability, interest, and capacity during the 2020-2021 pilot project phase.
Discussions to surface personas and use-cases were launched in the community groups for University Presses, Publishing Platforms and Services, and Commercial Publishers.
Operations, Policy, and Sustainability Modeling
Three RFPs were issued and distributed among listservs. Eleven resulting bids were evaluated by the project’s five Co-PIs and yours truly. Contracts were ultimately executed and three onboarding sessions occurred with:
Fiona Murphy, Josh Brown, Phill Jones, and Alice Meadows from Murphy Mitchell Consultancy for sustainability and budgetary modeling,
Michael Clarke and Laura Ricci from Clarke & Esposito for OA book usage data supply chain modeling, and
Agnes Gambill for legal consultancy services.
Consultant-led stakeholder interviews have begun to inform the sustainability and budgetary modeling effort.
Data stewardship and ethical use principles for the project are being prepared to be brought to the Policy WG for development and discussion.
A model data sharing agreement is being drafted by legal counsel to account for pilot project partners who may or may not want to continue with this effort at the end of the project phase.