OAeBU | October-December 2021 Update
Christina Drummond
Greetings Everyone:
In 2021, our global effort to strengthen the foundations of OA book usage data analytics has made incredible progress. I can’t help but continue to be impressed and humbled by the work we are pursuing together. As you read through the activities that took place over the fourth quarter below, I hope you appreciate how far we have come since discussions began over six years ago.
As our current project team winds down the active “Developing a Pilot Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage” grant this quarter, other efforts are ramping up. Separate teams are forming to advance the data trust and data dashboard findings through funding proposals for work through 2025. All of these efforts will require advisors, partners, and community consultation. If you are unsure of how to engage going forward, please reach out as I’d be happy to connect you.
OAeBU Data Trust: Our new Board of Trustees for the Data Trust has been elected and will be formalizing governance structures and guiding our fiscal sponsorship selection and/or legal incorporation efforts over the coming months. Simultaneously, grant development is underway for April deadlines to fund efforts through 2025. Kevin Hawkins, Yannick Legré, and myself are developing a team to clarify and document the governance building blocks required for a book usage data focused international data space, while I’m involved in conversations to advance proposals via Horizon Europe and the NSF to support the development and pilot of usage data exchange via IDS infrastructure with European and American partners respectively.
OAeBU Data Dashboards and Analytics: Lucy Montgomery, Cameron Neylon, Niels Stern, and Katherine Skinner are leading the effort to further develop OA book usage analytics and dashboard services separate from the data trust, building from the experience and lessons learned through our pilot dashboard partners.
Deliverables from our current grant have been archived in the Open Access EBook Usage Data Trust Zenodo Community for reference, citation or reuse under a CC BY 4.0 license. Our Advisory Board will meet once more in 2022 to review and celebrate all we’ve accomplished. OAeBU Data Trust branded communications and community groups will transition over the coming quarter to ensure continuity of operations across funding cycles.
The project’s impressive body of work was developed through community input and global partnerships. I hope you share my appreciation as you review, share, and reference these resources among your networks.
Best regards,
-Christina
OAeBU Data Trust | October to December 2021 Update
Raising Awareness
October through December, project efforts and outputs were shared at Educause 2021, LibPMC 2021, the Charleston Library Conference, Open Publishing Fest, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall Member Meeting and Force 2021. Invited presentations were also given to the AUPresses OA Committee and the Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem effort’s Annual Stakeholder Meeting. Video is now available for Laura Ricci’s presentation at the Charleston Opening the Book Pre-Conference (minutes 20-43), in which she describes the OA book usage data supply chain research her organization completed for this project.
Data Trust Organizational and Governance Development
The Data Trust Task Team of Advisory Board members completed the development of Governance Documentation for the Initial Board of Trustees. Trustee nomination and election occured as described in this document with nine Trustees being elected to begin terms January 1, 2022. Simultaneously, Christina Drummond received a job offer and accepted a retention offer to remain with the Data Trust as its Executive Director. Core Guiding Principles for OA Book Usage Data Services developed early in the governance process were finalized and published alongside the OA eBook Usage Data Trust: Related Principle Statements and Frameworks Ideation Output generated in September 2020.
Negotiations to secure a fiscal sponsor for the 2022-2025 OAeBU Data Trust governance building blocks grant continued. Conversations advanced with representatives of the New Venture Fund and Code for Science and Society, but ultimately did not result in a sponsorship agreement. Additional potential fiscal sponsors were identified and investigated, surfacing the fact that most nonprofit fiscal sponsors providing backend administrative services to global scholarly communications efforts had structured application processes that span 6-8 weeks, require staff and board resources, and do not always result in sponsorship agreements. In 2022, the Data Trust Board of Trustees will decide how to proceed given this information and the status of related grant-development efforts led by OAeBU community members.
OA Book Usage Dashboard Pilot Transition
To inform the Data Trust and dashboarding service directions through the lessons learned through the prototyping process, the technical team gathered and addressed partner feedback, while finalizing and documenting the code base. This included:
a further round of dashboard testing with partners including a substantial amount of work identifying and resolving data issues. Many issues revolve around inconsistent use of identifiers across data sources and the challenges of bringing multiple data sources together.
Note: the University of Michigan Press elected to make their prototype dashboard public via their website. You can view their prototype dashboard at: https://ebc.press.umich.edu/impact/ (see under Open Access Book Usage).
a focus on finalizing the underpinning technical infrastructure and moving towards making the documentation that will accompany the open source code comprehensive. This included some additional testing and work to validate that non-latin scripts and non-English text more generally can move through the system without errors
planning and preparation of the next phase of the project, including developing a technical roadmap to inform future development.