OAeBU Data Trust | October-December 2020 Update
Christina Drummond
2020 has been an exceptional year in so many ways. Instead of in-person conversations and workshops, our project to develop an OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) data trust has worked to find new ways to connect and reflect on common use cases and challenges surrounding the sharing, aggregating, and leveraging of monograph usage data. This quarterly update reflects how 2020 has laid groundwork for community discussions in 2021 on the role, governance, and sustainability of a data trust focused on OA ebooks.
As the new year dawns, I continue to be humbled by the braintrust of 100+ stakeholders across our OAeBU Data Trust project team, advisory groups and community discussion groups, who have opted in to guide and inform this project. Thanks to your contributions of time, energy, and brain power, a number of items are under community review. I look forward to the next year of discussion and debate as we work through the challenges that face book usage data analytics.
- Christina Drummond, OAeBU Data Trust Program Officer
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Understanding OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) Data Needs
To help frame the discussion of how a data trust can support the OA eBook supply chain, stakeholder groups are being asked to identify the staff roles that rely on OAeBU data, to then describe the activities that each undertakes with usage data. Our project’s Commercial and Library Publisher groups have started to consider their use cases for OAeBU data. Based on stakeholder input over 2020, the University Press OAeBU Use Cases and Publishing Platform and Service OAeBU Use Cases are now documented and under review. In Q1 of 2021, additional OAeBU use cases will be explored. The full set of OAeBU use cases will then support an analysis of how best a data trust can support stakeholder needs.
Technical Update
Data sharing agreement processing, data ingest and “telescope” script development, and adoption of a Elasticsearch/Kibana platform has been the focus of this quarter as the technical team continues to build upon the open source Academic Observatory code developed in the COKI project.
Three of six organizations have now completed data sharing agreements with the OAeBU data trust project, thereby formalizing their role as a dashboard pilot partner and beginning to share data with the data trust’s technical team. These include:
the Open Access Publishing in European Networks effort (OAPEN),
the Australian National University (ANU) Press, and
the University of College London (UCL) Press.
The basic plumbing for ingesting usage data and book metadata from various sources is in place. Next year, the project will look closely at how to compare and contrast actual data.
Growing our Community
Dimitris Pierrakos (OpenAIRE) joined the project’s Technical Advisory Group and Niels Stern agreed to replace Eelco Ferwerda on the Advisory Board in 2021.
During 2020, project team members made 15 presentations to raise awareness about the data trust concept and this project’s open calls for comment and participation in our community groups.
Save the Date: Project team members will be presenting about project findings at NISO+ 2021 (25 Feb)
Over the past quarter, presentations about project efforts were made at the 7:AM Online 2020 Conference, Basel Sustainable Publishing Forum, Charleston Library Conference, TOME Stakeholders Meeting and the Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools (JROST) 2020.
Project PI Cameron Neylon, Data Trust Program Officer Christina Drummond, and dashboard pilot partners Lara Speicher (Head of Publishing at UCL Press) and Ros Pyne (Director of Open Access Books at Springer Nature) discussed emerging OA eBook Usage data use cases and the data trust concept at the November 23rd OASPA webinar: Analyzing Open – Gaining Insights into Global OA eBook Usage, which had 240 organizations register 350 participants from over 40 countries.
Project staff continue to participate in allied effort conversations such as the Crossref Focus Group on Books on Multiple Platforms, the Invest in Open Initiative, and the Open Access Book Community Slack channel.
Budget and Sustainability Modeling
OA book metadata and usage data supply chain mapping
We released the draft OA eBook Supply Chain Mapping report authored by Michael Clarke and Laura Ricci for public comment, with project staff and advisors distributing the call for comments during OA Week, through the OA Book Network and via listservs like Read2.0. Together with the use-case documentation, this work will support conversations in 2021 about the role and potential impacts of a data trust within the OA book usage data ecosystem.
Legal research of regulatory requirements
Agnes Gambill, legal consultant to the project, has begun a comparative regulatory analysis of national and regional considerations related to a future OAeBU data trust incorporation and the location of post-pilot data storage and data processing functions.