OAEBUDT Partner Update

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christina.drummond

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Mar 3, 2026, 4:05:49 PM (10 days ago) Mar 3

to Announcements about "Developing a Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage"

Greetings All:

This month marks another step in our journey to develop a dataspace for scholarly communications.

I am writing to let you know that the Board of Trustees for the OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBUDT) effort has elected to sunset the OAEBUDT brand and governance board. This has always been a natural path for the effort and it will allow for a new cohort of leaders to take up the mantle of building a broader dataspace for scholarly communications.

As I reported last December, the OAEBUDT project has more than accomplished its initial success metrics. We:

developed community-informed trust indicators for open book usage data exchange,
defined participation terms, reporting and issue resolution processes to improve data quality, reduce risk and address gamification.
put such terms, definitions, and requirements into a dataspace participant rulebook in Zenodo to centralize documentation
and legal experts translated the rulebook into a standard participation agreement, changing norms into requirements.

In 2025, we developed, piloted, and documented an open-source dataspace infrastructure to support policy-aware data exchange at scale. With OPERAS-EU acting as the OAEBUDT’s dataspace coordinating office and Think-IT as the dataspace-as-a-service provider, JSTOR, Michigan Publishing, LibLynx, Ubiquity Press, Knowledge Unlatched, and Punctum Books successfully connected and routed data using policy-aware data connectors between server and API endpoints.

It’s increasingly clear that a dataspace will play a key role in helping libraries and publishers to control the flow and use of their data by bots and other discovery, analytics, or AI tools, while providing data stewards new interfaces to control and observe dynamic data flows with partners and bots.

The door is now open to organizations and coalitions wishing to step up and lead the founding of a Scholarly Communications Trusted Dataspace at global, national, or industrial levels. If you are interested in forming, advertising, or joining a coalition of organizations capable of leading and financially supporting the next phase, let me know so I can connect you with others wishing to do the same.

For more details on recent developments and the Board’s decision to choose the handover path, please read on:

With the minimum-viable system at “Technical Readiness Level 7 of 9” after being successfully piloted for controlled data access and use, we concluded 2025 with:

a technical roadmap,
clear value propositions for library consortia, publishers, and content aggregators,
case studies and lessons learned from the pilots, and
an understanding of the costs associated with coordinating a minimum-viable dataspace for the global scholarly communications ecosystem,
and the direction that instead of a dataspace just for OA book usage data, we needed a dataspace for all types of sensitive data flows across publishers, libraries, content aggregators, and their data processors, AI agents, and services.

Value emerged when seeing in real-time who is accessing your data and how, while retaining control over how, when, and where the data is used by specific organizations or bots. We learned that a dataspace can give non-technical data stewards an easy way to configure, observe, and manage their controlled data pipelines with other organizations in a scalable, secure way.

A 1.7 Million fundraising goal was set for the Founders Campaign to fund the next phase of development and launch with a year of working capital and additional year of operational reserve.

Yet, multiple factors are influencing the ability to crowdsource funding from the scholarly communications sector. It is perhaps not surprising that the first phase of our Founders Campaign did not meet its KPIs, securing only 10,000 Euro from two institutions over five months. OAEBUDT operational reserves are now under 5,000 Euro and staff and infrastructure support will be expended by June 2026. Collective library funding models like SCOSS and OBC also remain unavailable until the infrastructure is launched with an operational reserve in place.

The OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBUDT) Board of Trustees passed three resolutions to best support the 2026-2027 development of a scholarly communications trusted dataspace in light of the OAEBUDT initiative's financial health. The passed resolutions sunset the OAEBUDT brand and governance by April 30, 2026, provide notice to OPERAS-EU of this change, and signal willingness to directly support knowledge transfer through June for other organizations that step up to lead.

The resolutions are:

to “Dissolve the OAEBUDT Board of Trustees by April 30, 2026, to allow other governance bodies to assume leadership of the developing Scholarly Communications Trusted Dataspace effort.”
to, “Provide notice to OPERAS-EU per the executed September 2023 OAEBUDT Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement Section 7.4 Sunsetting, that the OAEBUDT Board of Trustees has deemed it appropriate to sunset the OAEBUDT; and that OPERAS-EU should work with the OAEBUDT Executive Director to cease all OAEBUDT activities and staffing by April 30, 2026 with a focus on openly sharing project outputs as allowed by law to maximize ongoing impact.”
“The OAEBUDT Board hereby commits to facilitate knowledge dissemination and staff transitions in support of this leadership transfer through June 2026 “

Sunsetting the OAEBUDT brand and governance body thoughtfully meets this financial moment in history when the scholarly communications industry has less capacity to fund membership-model supported infrastructures over digital innovation and AI. This planned OAeBUDT governance dissolution provides a window for a supported leadership transition and knowledge transfer should an organization or coalition emerge to advance this work in 2026. Staff are available through June 2026 to support adoption of the open project outputs in our Zenodo community and OAEBUDT Dataspace Github. This transition is also responsive to stakeholder feedback that the value provided by a dataspace service for scholarly communications is generated when multiple types of sensitive data can be aggregated, benchmarked, or made accessible by AI - well beyond the scope of open access, the humanities, book publishing, or book usage.

We couldn’t have reached this milestone without the contributions of our project partners, advisors, and supporters. We welcome your thoughts, questions, and support as we transition into the next phase. I am happy to discuss this via video if you have thoughts on next steps. (You can schedule a time to talk at: https://calendly.com/oaebudt_drummond.)

I thank this community for getting us to this phase of development. On behalf of the outgoing OAEBUDT Board, we hope you share our excitement as we look to the future where scholarly communications partners manage controlled data flows to produce higher quality services and digital innovation.