April - June 2024 OAEBUDT Update
Ursula Rabar
Greetings everyone,
As we approach the summer break, the OAEBUDT team has some exciting milestones and achievements to share in preparation for our data space technical pilot. Keep reading to learn more about news on the Rulebook version 0.0 publication, committed technical pilot partners, sustainability modeling and much more.
As always, feel free to reach out with questions and comments using my contact info:
Ursula Rabar, Community Manager | OA Book Usage Data Trust
ursula.rabar at operas-eu.org
OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBUDT) | April - June 2024 Update
Highlights:
Completing the 13-month drafting phase, version 0.0 of the OA Book Usage Data Exchange and Stewardship Rulebook of participation principles for the OAEBUDT was published. The rulebook development process was also documented to inform other data space efforts. You can find both of these in our Governance Building Blocks project community in Zenodo.
The first phase of community consultations to inform our sustainability model was completed, spanning in-person workshops, online focus groups and web-based forms. The community consultation process and feedback received will be published in Zenodo over the coming months.
The initial group of partners for the technical pilot has been confirmed - University of Michigan Publishing, Taylor & Francis, LibLynx, Punctum Books, and JSTOR will be the first to connect via our minimum viable data space to learn while piloting the exchange of OA book related COUNTER item-level metrics.
Grant and partnership development is underway to support additional OAEBUDT data space extensibility research and functionality development through beta cohorts. Christina is in conversation with multiple organizational networks looking to make usage data aggregation, benchmarking and reporting possible across their usage data creators and their usage analytics service providers. If you’re interested in testing out the IDS in 2025, or exploring how it could support the exchange of additional data beyond the views and downloads of OA books, read more details here and reach out to either Ursula or Christina. Individual organizations are welcome to connect to the OAEBUDT data space in the beta cohort, as EBSCO, OAPEN, and Longleaf Services have agreed to do.
A technical development team has been selected by our Board of Trustees to build our proof of concept alpha IDS protocol standards using existing open source components already in use across the data space community. Following the recommendation of 67 Bricks in the Technical IDS Gap Analysis that we work with experienced data space experts for our initial build, we partnered with the International Data Spaces Association to advertise our RFP. Four submitted proposals were evaluated by the OAEBUDT Technical Advisory Committee and Board of Trustees. After much deliberation, the Board selected Think-IT to build our minimum viable proof of concept data space with the alpha cohort and Technical Advisory Committee.
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The Details:
Supported by the 2022-2025 Advancing to Launch project funded by the Mellon Foundation, staff facilitated Trustee and subcontractor efforts to further develop the OAEBUDT’s community governance, participation agreements, and sustainability model.
Community Governance
The Board continues to meet quarterly to provide direction as we prepare for a 2025 service launch. The Governance and Policy Committee is working to refine the Conflict of Interest disclosure process and develop a Code of Conduct policy to bring to the Board of Trustees while the Finance and Fundraising Committee is informing strategies to support both pilot phase research and the development of a financially sustainable operations budget.
Participation Rulebook and Agreement Development
Version 0.0 of the OA Book Usage Data Exchange and Stewardship Rulebook has been published, completing this phase of the journey that started with an in-person workshop in Brussels in April 2023 where an initial set of data exchange principles was drafted. The proceedings of the workshop informed follow-on online and in-person consultations on trusted usage data exchange. At the same time, the Rulebook Task Team was formed, representing stakeholders from the publishing, library, service providers and infrastructure communities. This group worked on expanding and finalizing draft rulebook document, with their work presented back to the community for feedback via web forms and focus groups. In March, online comments were invited on the final rulebook draft which was made publicly available and advertised via social media, email and presentations. A report documenting this development process has been published in our ‘Governance Build Blocks’ project Zenodo community alongside community consultation results.
The Rulebook now moves into legal review and codification via terms and conditions in standard contractual clause drafting. Yannick Legré, Co-PI on the Governance Building Blocks Mellon-funded project, is managing this process and legal team in collaboration with the other project PIs.
Technical Pilot
The preparation phase for the technical OAEBUDT data space pilot is nearly complete. Organizations have signed on to inform the development of a minimum viable proof of concept with experienced IDS system integrators, allowing them to understand the data space capabilities and the potential returns on time/resources generated by connecting to a data space.
Two cohorts of organizations have been established:
An alpha cohort will send and/or receive usage data as ThinkIT builds the minimum viable OAEBUDT data space proof of concept. Organizations in this cohort include: University of Michigan Publishing, Taylor & Francis, Punctum Books, LibLynx, and JSTOR. Technical documentation and roadmaps will result as we explore the value propositions for this scholarly communications data space. This work will be informed by the OAEBUDT’s Board of Trustees and Technical Advisory Board and is scheduled for 2024.
A beta cohort will refine processes to increase efficiency and reduce cost while exploring how a data space could expand to generate value across more use cases. Networks of organizations are discussing onboarding together to explore how to streamline their network-wide data sharing and/or reporting; EBSCO, Longleaf Services and OAPEN are also participating in the beta phase. If you are interested in taking part in the 2025 beta group, you can read more details here and reach out to either Ursula or Christina.
Sustainability Model Development
In this quarter, OAEBUDT staff completed the community consultation phase to inform cost recovery options and sustainability model development. The November 2023 to May 2024 process included the facilitation of in-person workshops (Charleston Pre-Conference, Researcher 2 Reader and OPERAS), two online focus groups and different web forms. Findings were shared with the Membership and Sustainability Committee, Board of Trustees and Advisory Board and are being documented for publication via Zenodo.
IDS Extensibility for Open Journal and Open Data Usage and Impact Metrics Exchange Research
In this quarter, some OAEBUDT partners, including Executive Director Christina Drummond, have been leading US National Science Foundation funded research that could inform future conversations of the OAEBUDT data space’s extensibility. Building on a 2023 workshop co-hosted by Charles Watkinson and Christina Drummond in partnership with the Coalition of Networked Information (CNI), NSF funded a rapid comparative analysis project to understand similarities and differences between book, journal, and dataset usage and impact related vocabularies and supply chains. Laura Ricci and Michael Clarke (Clarke & Esposito) are following up on their OA Book Supply Chain report by documenting the supply chains for journals and data. Jennifer Kemp (Stratos Consulting), is documenting usage and impact data related vocabularies across output types while generating a vocabularies crosswalk. Outputs of this research will be available to inform sustainability planning and technical development roadmaps late 2024.
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Raising Awareness:
In Q2, staff, Trustees and research partners presented at library, publisher, OA and open infrastructure conferences and events to raise awareness of this effort and solicit feedback:
April:
OPERAS conference workshop, Exploring Sustainability for Global OA Book Usage Data Trust Infrastructure, facilitators Christina Drummond and Ursula Rabar, in-person
May:
Presentation The OA Book Usage Data Trust at the PASA Scholarly Publishers Committee: OA Workshop, speaker Ursula Rabar, online
SSP poster presentation OA Book Usage Data Trust - Project Update, speaker Jennifer Schivas, in-person
June:
IDSA Ecosystem Building Call presentation, The OA Book Usage Data Trust, June 2024, speaker Ursula Rabar, online
AUPresses annual conference invited presentation as part of the panel Tracking OA Metrics -What, How and for What End, speaker Christina Drummond, in-person
Showcasing of the OA Book Usage Data Trust as part of the PIDfest panel Don’t Judge a Book by Its PID Coverage, speaker Jennifer Kemp, hybrid
Looking ahead, during September OAEBUDT representatives will be speaking at ALPSP and OASPA conferences in-person, and at NISO Plus 2024.