OA Book Usage Data Trust Effort
Project: Advancing to Launch by Developing International Data Space (IDS) Governance Building Blocks for Scholarly Communications
July 2022 – June 2026
Interested organizational representatives are invited to register and join scholarly publishing peers to discuss the future of this work during a Q2-2026 community call series scheduled for 12:00 UTC on: 23 April, 28 May, 25 June.
Attendees can register to obtain call information at: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ZMJZUfOVTkmEmt7VLabtGw
This project engaged global stakeholders to develop governance, trust, and sustainability mechanisms for a data space ecosystem that would enable managed data connections across verified scholarly communications organisations. Specifically, this project advanced the concept of an international data space for scholarly communications by successfully developing and piloting resources for an extensible ecosystem that could first support managed data aggregation and benchmarking for distributed OA book related usage data.
Project Outputs
In this project, work packages produced:
- Guiding principles and community-governance to coordinate the global infrastructure’s development and stakeholder engagement,
- facilitated community workshops and consultations to create a participant “rule book” that retains trust across participating infrastructure stakeholders,
- an IDS Technical Gap Analysis to assess existing scholarly communications focused platforms and services capable of providing core functional IDS network services,
- a minimum viable open-source data space developed in line with emerging ISO/IEC dataspace standards to help individual organizations manage sensitive data access and use across organizational networks,
- Technical documentation for scholarly communications dataspace participants and administrators,
- Pilots of the dataspace’s usage data connector service and participation agreements with six public and commercial OA book usage data providers and recipients, producing case studies and a report on the potential ROI for dataspace onboarding and participation, and
- facilitated community workshops to identify trusted revenue generation sources and develop supporter and membership models to inform a diversified sustainability model represented in a Business Model Canvas.
Project outputs were published with open licenses via Zenodo and Github.
Piloting the First Dataspace for Scholarly Communications
Mid 2025, the minimum viable dataspace for scholarly communications successfully supported data exchange among technical pilot partners. The resulting, state-of-the-art open source dataspace built by Think-It for this project leveraged open source code, standards, and protocols managed by the Eclipse Foundation and the International Data Spaces Association.
Video recordings were produced to showcase the developed inter-organization OAEBUDT Usage Data Connector service MVP via the Scholarly Communications Trusted Dataspace.
- Data Provider MVP Preview (<10 min. runtime)
- Data Recipient MVP Preview (<8 min. runtime)
These videos show the minimum-viable proof of concept for an organization-to-organization usage data, not an overall final “dataspace-as-a-service” (DSaaS) product with web interface to simplify the staff UX so data stewards can configure data connector licensing-terms and metadata without knowledge of Postman, code or APIs.
Project Team
Principal Investigators
- Christina Drummond, University of North Texas
- Yannick Legré, OPERAS
- Prodromos Tsiavos (2023-Current); Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE (2022)
Project Staff
- Ursula Rabar, OPERAS (thru August 2025)
Project Advisory Board Members
- Brian O’Leary, Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
- Charles Watkinson, University of Michigan Press
- Jo Lambert, JISC Usage Statistics Portal and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS-UK) (thru January 2025)
- Jon Elwell, EBSCO
- Maria Zucker, De Gruyter (thru August 2023)
- Niels Stern, OAPEN and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
- Peter Potter, TOME Project / De Gruyter
- Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Project COUNTER (thru April 2024)
- Vivian Berghahn, Berghahn Books
Consulting Contributors
Technical Pilot Partners
- Michigan Publishing
- Punctum Books
- JSTOR
- LibLynx
- Knowledge Unlatched and Annual Reviews
- Ubiquity Press and the De Gruyter eBound Foundation
An archived version of the related OA Book Usage Data Trust branded website is available via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
This work was sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.