OAeBU Data Trust | January-March 2021 Update
Christina Drummond
Greetings Everyone:
This project team is making progress on multiple work packages to prepare resources for this year’s planned community discussions on the role, governance, and sustainability of an OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) data trust. In this quarterly project update, I highlight these in-progress efforts and upcoming engagement opportunities.
We couldn’t do this work without you! Thank you for your time, attention and contributions to date.
Best regards,
- Christina Drummond, OAeBU Data Trust Program Officer
Raising Awareness
Project team members continue to present on facets of this project at virtual events:
At NISO+ 2021, project Co-PI Brian O’Leary joined project consultant Laura Ricci of Clarke & Esposito and Lorraine Estelle of Project COUNTER to discuss how standards development could address the challenges facing OAeBU data analytics that have emerged from our project’s research and OA ebook data supply chain analysis.
In February’s Open Book Metadata OASPA webinar, project Program Officer Christina Drummond discussed how neutral usage-data stewardship based on community norms can foster complex data transfers and economies of scale across publishers, platforms and services, and libraries.
In March, Ms. Drummond presented a project update at the Coalition for Networked Information Spring 2021 Meeting, which has since been posted to YouTube.
Project representatives continue to participate in allied effort conversations. For example, Ms. Ricci presented the OA eBook data supply chain analysis report to Crossref’s Book Advisory Group, and Ms. Drummond assisted the Open Data Institute in developing its Sustainable Data Access Workbook with the aim of leveraging the workbook in this project later this year.
Over the next quarter, OAeBU Data Trust project representatives will be presenting at the 2021 Library Publishing Coalition Forum, the Best Practices Exchange, the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and the AU Presses 2021 Annual Meeting.
Documenting OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) Data Uses
Our project’s open community stakeholder groups have continued to document the staff roles in their organizations that rely on OAeBU data and their activities and reports that involve such data.
In partnership with the TOME initiative, project staff facilitated a scholars workshop, documenting their uses of OAeBU data in their roles as authors, editors, and P&T committee members.
Commercial publisher representatives developed their use-case documentation through our project’s facilitated activities and workshops. Their outputs are now open for public comment via the project website.
Library representatives similarly developed their OAeBU data use cases. The outputs are currently undergoing community review prior to being released for broad public review later this month.
Combined with the previously released draft use cases for university presses and book publishing platforms and services (linked on the OAeBU project webpage), these documents illuminate the types of queries, reports, and functions stakeholders are seeking from OAeBU data and hint at ways a data trust could serve the OA eBook usage data supply chain. The project’s technical team and business model consultants are referencing these resources to inform their work packages. In the coming quarter, the project aims to publish the full set of use cases for broad community use.
Organizational and Sustainability Modeling
Project consultants have been busy preparing background materials to inform planning conversations for an operational OAeBU usage data trust governance and sustainability model.
Project legal consultant Agnes Gambill completed a legal analysis to inform the incorporation of an operational data trust. She summarized international regulatory issues pertaining to an OA eBook usage data trust and then analyzed and recommended potential organizational incorporation structures and locations.
In response to this legal analysis, the OAeBU data use-cases, and the proposed EU Data Governance Act, project business model consultants Fiona Murphy, Alice Meadows, Josh Brown, and Phill Jones have begun to develop separate business model canvases for a) the neutral multi-lateral usage data stewardship and exchange functionality of the data trust and b) a usage data analytics platform and dashboarding service.
Project OA data supply chain consultants Michael Clarke and Laura Ricci incorporated public comments and finalized the OA Books Supply Chain Mapping Report. Building upon this work, they have begun to explore whether an existing entity may be positioned to host an OA book usage data exchange that provides neutral data stewardship for both public and private parties, either with or without an accompanying data analytics service.
Technical Update
Kibana and Elasticsearch were implemented alongside the Academic Observatory as open source solutions to support the OAeBU data dashboard pilots. Usage dashboard mock-up development commenced for the four of six pilot partners with signed data sharing agreements in place with Curtin University. In March, ANU Press representatives became the first to provide feedback on their mockup, allowing further refinement of the underlying data schema and dashboard design. Pilot partner feedback and iterative dashboard development will continue in the next quarter, allowing partners to progressively review a mockup and prototype, prior to piloting the dashboard.
Data ingest processes and Academic Observatory “telescopes” continue to be developed and tested, in addition to data access controls being piloted via role-based permissions and Kibana’s “Spaces” functionality. An iterative process of refining data ingest pathways, data storage schema, data analysis processes and the dashboards themselves will be required to coordinate the technical development. An initial data schema and the dashboard mockup was presented to this project’s Technical Advisory Group for review and comment. Data linking, identifier matching, and disambiguation efforts are underway within the pilots, identifying issues and challenges in the underlying data consistency and quality relating to scholarly books. The technical team also began analyzing the functional requirements embedded within the OAeBU data use-cases, to identify which functionality is expected to be piloted through the dashboard pilots.