OAeBU Data Trust | April-June 2021 Update
Christina Drummond
Greetings Everyone:
The past quarter has continued our remarkable progress. Our project shifted from documenting and understanding the OA ebook usage data ecosystem and use cases to surfacing questions about usage data harmonization and processing for community consultation. Advisory Board members began modeling governance attributes for community review based on the reports created by the project’s consultants and the data use-cases. Plus, our work was represented at seven events before publishing, library, and repository audiences.
I invite you to pause and join me in reflecting upon what we are creating together. I am truly humbled by what this community is accomplishing!
Thank you for your continued contributions and engagement.
Christina Drummond
OAeBU Data Trust Program Officer
Raising Awareness
This April through June, project efforts and outputs were represented as follows.
At the 2021 Library Publishing Coalition Forum, Charles Watkinson, Lara Speicher, and Andrew Joseph joined Cameron Neylon and Christina Drummond to discuss their experiences piloting the OA ebook usage data dashboards.
Christina Drummond presented on data governance, trust, and privacy aspects of our work at the Best Practices Exchange and the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Annual Meeting. At Open Repositories, she spoke about fostering trust by identifying and navigating stakeholder interests to facilitate cross-platform data exchange.
Kevin Hawkins and Christina Drummond facilitated a feedback session at AUPresses 2021 where attendees reviewed the University of Michigan Press dashboard prototype to then provide feedback on both the usage data dashboard and usage data exchange services.
In June, Cameron Neylon and Christina Drummond presented to COUNTER’s OA Advisory Group, highlighting key elements of the OAeBU project’s technical response to COUNTER’s Community Consultation on Reporting Global Usage and Usage of Open Content Not Attributed to Institutions
At the 14th BISG-NISO Forum on the Changing Standards Landscape, held in conjunction with ALA, Brian O’Leary interviewed Christina Drummond about issues of trust, data consistency, and data interoperability.
In August and September, project representatives are planning to present at a NISO event and the Data for Policy Conference.
Documenting OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) Data Uses
Over the past quarter, Kevin Hawkins and Christina Drummond worked with graphic designer Philemon Eniola to transform the set of stakeholder-specific google documents into the draft OA eBook Usage Data Analytics and Reporting Use Cases by Stakeholder report. Public comment is in the process of being incorporated into a final version.
Technical Update
The last data sharing agreement was signed by our sixth dashboard pilot partner, concluding a ten-month legal negotiation process for research-related data sharing between partners and project data steward Curtin University.
Development on the open-source rehostable codebase continued, as documented via the OAeBU project within the Academic Observatory Github. Automated data ingest processes (i.e. “Telescopes”) developed for the pilot now include: ONIX-FTP, IRUS-UK, Google Analytics, JSTOR, Google Books, Crossref (Metadata, Fundref, Events), Unpaywall, Microsoft Academic Graph, DOAB, OAPEN, and ORCID. Multiple questions around disambiguation and linking practices for metadata were identified and shared via an OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) Metadata Community Consultation with representatives of BISG, COUNTER, Crossref, and other members of this project’s Technical Standards and Norms Working Group. In addition, Cameron Neylon submitted a response to the June 2021 Reporting Global Usage and Usage of Open Content Not Attributed to Institutions COUNTER Consultation.
Iterative development of prototype usage data dashboards has continued with the dashboard partners. Investigation into benchmarking opportunities is in progress. Comparative analysis of the OAeBU data use cases and the pilot dashboards established the desired functionality that is expected to be developed and tested in the pilots:
automated data flows from private and public sources
data processing in order to surface
summary data for book corpus (numbers, overall usage etc)
per book usage counts segmented by source platform
institutional usage (where available from the platform)
Title/ID disambiguation
benchmarking of
usage data by platform across data provided by from multiple presses
usage data by subject within a given platform
usage data by date of release
Additional proofs of concept that are being investigated for a future phase of development include:
sales data linking
per book analysis of eBook usage compared to respective hard copies
inclusion of time point specific marketing event data
Organizational and Sustainability Modeling
This quarter, project advisory board members began modeling governance frameworks based upon the research conducted to date through this project. Advisory Board members reviewed the Legal Agenda prepared by Agnes Gambill; Business Model Canvases prepared by Fiona Murphy, Alice Meadows, Josh Brown, and Phill Jones; and the OA eBook Supply Chain Mapping Report and Environmental Scan prepared by Michael Clarke and Laura Ricci. Considering the analyses in these resources, members of the advisory board drafted an initial set of guiding principles to guide governance development efforts. Sub-groups of advisory board members formed with charges to work through September to separately model governance elements for community review for 1) the usage data analytics and dashboarding service developed through our six dashboard partner pilots and 2) the trusted multi-lateral usage data stewardship and exchange functionality needed to support multi-platform, public-private usage data aggregation, benchmarking, and provisioning at scale. Katherine Skinner and Christina Drummond are guiding the work of each sub-group as they draft initial service-to-impact models, mission and vision statements.
Other Updates
Ms. Drummond is seeking out promising practices and resources to inform data stewardship and governance framework development for this global project. To this end, she attended the annual meeting of the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA) and is participating in the GovLab’s Data Stewards Academy. The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), through Co-PI Brian O’Leary, has joined the IDSA on behalf of the project to provide greater access to resources being generated in Europe via GAIA-X. Surfaced resources are being shared via this project’s Policy Working Group for consideration. Resources shared to date include an emerging ISO standard for a data sharing agreement framework and the Design Principles for Data Spaces Position Paper which relates to DIN SPEC 27070 “Requirements and reference architecture of a security gateway for the exchange of industry data and services”.