Category Archives: oa.usage

Proceedings of the Workshop Exploring National Infrastructure for Public Access Usage and Impact Reporting

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“Invited international experts and leading scholarly cyberinfrastructure representatives joined workshop organizers Christina Drummond and Charles Watkinson for an eight-hour facilitated workshop on April 2, 2023. Together they aimed to: ? identify the challenges preventing cross-platform public and open scholarship impact analytics at scale, ? explore open infrastructure opportunities to improve the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reuse i.e. “FAIRness” of usage data, and ? identify what’s needed to scaffold America’s national infrastructure for scholarly output impact reporting in light of a) the August 2022 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) “Nelson Memo” regarding “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research,” and b) the European Open Science Cloud Core and Interoperability Framework. Participants were encouraged to consider the challenges related to impact reporting and storytelling for research outputs ranging from data, articles, and books to simulations, 3D models, and other multimedia. The workshop objectives shared in advance of the meeting with participants were: ? identify what’s needed to scaffold America’s national infrastructure for scholarly output impact reporting, ? develop recommendations for national infrastructure and investment, and ? prioritize and begin to map out what activities we need to undertake next to support these recommendations. 1…”

Current State and Future Directions for Open Repositories in Europe

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“In January 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched a joint strategy aimed at strengthening the European repository network. As a first step, a survey of the European repository landscape was undertaken in February-March 2023. The survey found that, collectively, European repositories acquire, preserve and provide open access to tens or possibly hundreds of millions of valuable research outputs and represent critical, not-for-profit infrastructure in the European open science landscape. They are used for sharing articles that may be pay-walled in published journals, but also for providing access to a large variety of other types of research outputs including research data, theses/dissertations, conference papers, preprints, code, and so on. 

However, in order to ensure the European repository network is fit for purpose and able to support the evolving needs of the research community, the survey also identified three areas in particular that could be strengthened: maintaining up-to-date, highly functioning software platforms; applying consistent and comprehensive good practices in terms of metadata, preservation, and usage statistics; and gaining appropriate visibility in the scholarly ecosystem.

Despite the challenges, the current climate offers exciting opportunities for repositories. Many funders are actively promoting the repository route for articles because of their role in supporting equitable access to content (i.e. no fees to access or deposit). The value proposition for open science is growing and repositories are increasingly recognised as the main mechanism for collecting and providing access to a wide range of other research outputs. Add to this, the nascent, but growing, interest in the publish-review-curate model in which repositories have a central function, and it seems they are well placed to expand their current role in the ecosystem. 

The survey provides essential data that will help shape a joint strategy to enhance and strengthen European repositories that will be developed over the next several months.”

The state of green open access in Canadian universities | The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science

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Abstract:  This study investigates the use of institutional repositories for self-archiving peer-reviewed work in the U15 (an association of fifteen Canadian research-intensive universities). It relates usage with university open access (OA) policy types and publisher policy embargoes. We show that of all articles found in OpenAlex attributed to U15 researchers, 45.1 to 56.6% are available as Gold or Green OA, yet only 0.5 to 10.7% (mean 4.2%) of these can be found on their respective U15 IRs. Our investigation shows a lack of OA policies from most institutions, journal policies with embargoes exceeding 12 months, and incomplete policy information.

 

Snijder (2023) Measured in a context: making sense of open access book data | UKSG Insights

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Abstract: Open access (OA) book platforms, such as JSTOR, OAPEN Library or Google Books, have been available for over a decade. Each platform shows usage data, but this results in confusion about how well an individual book is performing overall. Even within one platform, there are considerable usage differences between subjects and languages. Some context is therefore necessary to make sense of OA books usage data. A possible solution is a new metric – the Transparent Open Access Normalized Index (TOANI) score. It is designed to provide a simple answer to the question of how well an individual open access book or chapter is performing. The transparency is based on clear rules, and by making all of the data used visible. The data is normalized, using a common scale for the complete collection of an open access book platform and, to keep the level of complexity as low as possible, the score is based on a simple metric. As a proof of the concept, the usage of over 18,000 open access books and chapters in the OAPEN Library has been analysed, to determine whether each individual title has performed as well as can be expected compared to similar titles.

COVID-19 Wikipedia pageview spikes, 2019-2022 – addshore

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“Back in 2019 at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, Wikipedia saw large spikes in page views on COVID-19 related topics while people here hunting for information.

I briefly looked at some of the spikes in March 2020 using the easy-to-use pageview tool for Wikimedia sites. But the problem with viewing the spikes through this tool is that you can only look at 10 pages at a time on a single site, when in reality you’d want to look at many pages relating to a topic, across multiple sites at once.

I wrote a notebook to do just this, submitted it for privacy review, and I am finally getting around to putting some of those moving parts and visualizations in public view….”

OA Book Usage Data Trust seeks feedback – Open Access Books Network

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“The OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBUDT) effort is working towards addressing the challenge of aggregating and curating OA book usage (OAEBU) data by enabling community-governed sharing of quality, interoperable OAEBU data. Currently, they are developing the draft OA Book Usage Data Exchange and Stewardship Rulebook to specify the principles that generate trust through OAEBUDT participation, usage data management, processing, and provision.

With that aim, the OAEBUDT is inviting feedback on the drafted principles to ensure they are developed in line with the community. You can participate by taking part in focus groups or by providing your feedback via online surveys….”

OA Book Usage Data Trust | Data Quality Community Consultation

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OA Book Usage Data Trust | Data Quality Community Consultation

Provide your feedback by the 15th of October via this form: https://forms.gle/3yRb7QfcodndHiTW9

About our work: This effort enables the community-governed sharing of quality, interoperable, Open Access (e)Book Usage (OAEBU) data. Our governance abides by Guiding Principles for OA Book Usage Data Services as we develop a data space for public and private organizations that create, combine, and innovate with OA book usage data. Our Board of Trustees is a working board composed of elected Trustees led by an executive committee of board officers. As noted in the data trust’s governance documentation, trustees share responsibility for: strategy and direction setting, fiduciary oversight of project financials and fiscal sponsorship arrangements, and supervision of the effort’s executive director.

Community Consultation Background: Multiple challenges exist for those who would like to share generated OA book usage data with others (data creators), and for those who rely on such data to provide reporting or services analytics (data users). Currently, individual organizations encounter challenges when aggregating OA book usage data to make strategic decisions about their OA publishing and OA programs. They individually manage, compile, and link usage data metrics making it time-consuming. Additionally, they may face resource challenges in adopting COUNTER, instead relying on tools such as Google Analytics that further complicate usage data interoperability. While many deliver audited, trusted usage metrics through COUNTER-compliant reports, aggregating usage metrics across platforms is not common. Finally, some organizations are often unable to provide their raw usage data to competitors due to dynamics that cannot be resolved by trust alone. 

Such challenges extend beyond scholarly communications. To address such issues across industries in an interoperable way, European agencies have fostered International Data Spaces (IDS) infrastructure for data sharing through a neutral intermediary that is as open as possible, but as controlled as necessary. The IDS aim is to provide a digital infrastructure to foster the exchange and computation of data among public and private competitors, to generate value through: 1) increased interoperability, 2) trust in secure and transparent exchange, and 3) multiparty data governance through usage controls and community-based accountability measures. 

The Open Access Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBUDT) is piloting the Industry Data Space (IDS) model in scholarly communications, building upon emerging design principles, technical architectures, and standards. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the OAEBUDT is developing ‘Governance Building Blocks’ for its IDS, to guide the rules and accountability measures for OAEBUDT participation. To inform the development of model standard contractual clauses, this project is developing an OA Book Usage Data Exchange and Stewardship Rulebook to specify the principles that generate trust through OAEBUDT participation, usage data management, processing, and provision.

You can preview this consultation in full prior to submitting your comments.

 

Community Consultation | Participant Notice

In this community consultation, we invite feedback on principles drafted to ensure trust in the provided usage data and its quality notification process via the OAEBUDT.

Submitted comments will be discussed among the OAEBUDT project team, including advisors and the OAEBUDT community governance. Unattributed submissions will also be published on the project’s Zenodo community. By submitting comments through this form you agree to the publication, sharing and reuse of your comments under a CC0 license or CCBY license.

Contact: For any questions please contact Ursula Rabar, OAEBUDT Community Manager, at ursula.rabar@operas-eu.org. 

OA Book Usage Data Trust | Data Provider Community Consultation

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In this community consultation, the OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBUDT) effort invites feedback on principles drafted to ensure trust in the usage data providers participating in the OAEBUDT.

Written comments can be submitted through this form until September 15, 2023: https://forms.gle/n4nuqp6mqBSkegzV8 

Submitted comments will be discussed among the OAEBUDT project team, including advisors and the OAEBUDT community governance. Unattributed submissions will also be published on the project’s Zenodo community. By submitting comments through this form you agree to the publication, sharing and reuse of your comments under a CC0 license or CCBY license.

Contact: For any questions please contact Ursula Rabar, OAEBUDT Community Manager, at ursula.rabar@operas-eu.org. 

 

The OA Book Usage Data Trust effort enables the community-governed sharing of quality, interoperable, Open Access (e)Book Usage (OAEBU) data. Our governance abides by Guiding Principles for OA Book Usage Data Services as we develop a data space for public and private organizations that create, combine, and innovate with OA book usage data. Our Board of Trustees is a working board composed of elected Trustees led by an executive committee of board officers. As noted in the data trust’s governance documentation, trustees share responsibility for: strategy and direction setting, fiduciary oversight of project financials and fiscal sponsorship arrangements, and supervision of the effort’s executive director.

Community Consultation Background: Multiple challenges exist for those who would like to share generated OA book usage data with others (data creators), and for those who rely on such data to provide reporting or services analytics (data users). Currently, individual organizations encounter challenges when aggregating OA book usage data to make strategic decisions about their OA publishing and OA programs. They individually manage, compile, and link usage data metrics making it time-consuming. Additionally, they may face resource challenges in adopting COUNTER, instead relying on tools such as Google Analytics that further complicate usage data interoperability. While many deliver audited, trusted usage metrics through COUNTER-compliant reports, aggregating usage metrics across platforms is not common. Finally, some organizations are often unable to provide their raw usage data to competitors due to dynamics that cannot be resolved by trust alone. 

Such challenges extend beyond scholarly communications. To address such issues across industries in an interoperable way, European agencies have fostered International Data Spaces (IDS) infrastructure for data sharing through a neutral intermediary that is as open as possible, but as controlled as necessary. The IDS aim is to provide a digital infrastructure to foster the exchange and computation of data among public and private competitors, to generate value through: 1) increased interoperability, 2) trust in secure and transparent exchange, and 3) multiparty data governance through usage controls and community-based accountability measures. 

The OAEBUDT is piloting the Industry Data Space (IDS) model in scholarly communications, building upon emerging design principles, technical architectures, and standards. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the OAEBUDT is developing ‘Governance Building Blocks’ for its IDS, to guide the rules and accountability measures for OAEBUDT participation. To inform the development of model standard contractual clauses, this project is developing an OA Book Usage Data Exchange and Stewardship Rulebook to specify the principles that generate trust through OAEBUDT participation, usage data management, processing, and provision.

You can preview this consultation in full prior to submitting your comments at https://bit.ly/OAEBUDataProviderConsultationPreview  

 

Open Standards, Open Infrastructures, and Author Inclusion: Transitioning to Open eBook Usage Data · punctum books

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by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Providing open and trustworthy usage data on open access (OA) publications remains a challenge as the scholarly publication market continues its general shift toward forms of publishing that keep publicly funded knowledge in the public domain, even though the economic models behind them often remain questionable.

At punctum books, we believe that every aspect of the scholarly book production chain should be open — built on open infrastructures, following open standards, made available in open formats, and, most importantly, co-governed by a community of authors, institutions, funders, and publishers. The existence of any proprietary link in this chain constitutes a potential point of profit extraction and is as such vulnerable to corporate capture. This has become very clear from the way in which giant commercial publishing-turned-data-analytics companies embrace OA only to move their shareholder profit extraction from the public purse further upstream to research environments and datasets. Downstream usage data provide another such potential point of capture and monetization.

There are currently two large-scale projects involved in developing platforms for providing harmonized usage data for open access books.

In 2021, the stakeholders in the OA Book Usage Data Trust, funded by the Mellon Foundation, developed their initial governance principles and are now working toward the launch of a technical pilot for an “international data space for open access book usage data between 2022 and 2025.” While the results of this technical pilot are not yet public, the organization mentions in its prospectus that “there is not currently a trusted book usage data exchange infrastructure neutrally operated by a consortium of book-publishing stakeholders to facilitate the aggregation and benchmarking of both open and controlled usage data for specified uses by trusted partners” (my emphasis). Considering the commercial partners in this project and the contradiction between the professed openness of the data trust and the gatekeeping signal words “specified” and “trusted,” it appears unlikely that the data trust itself will eventually be truly, fully open, even if built on open infrastructures.

Another pilot is the Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) Project, also running from 2022 to 2025, coordinated by the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) and again funded by the Mellon Foundation. BAD has already launched an initial proof of concept dashboard showing data from the University of Michigan Press (which is also involved in the OA Book Usage Data Trust project). Importantly, these data are indeed open to anyone and directly downloadable from the dashboard under an open license. COKI’s initial findings from focus groups run in the first quarter of 2023 are also publicly available. This in itself is a hopeful sign that the project is moving in a fully open direction.

[…]

The Book Analytics Dashboard project: reflections on coordination, collaboration, and community consultation | COKI

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by Kathryn Napier, BAD project Technical Lead, Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), Curtin University

The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project (2022-2025) is a 3-year, Mellon Foundation funded project that is creating a sustainable analytics service to support diverse Open Access (OA) book publishers. Affectionately referred to as the BAD project, our goal is to provide publishers with user-friendly tools to navigate complex data about how their books are being used. The project is grounded in the premise that efficient, user-friendly usage analytics services are needed to safeguard and support diversity in the voices, perspectives, geographies, topics, and languages made visible through OA books. 

The BAD project is building on the earlier (2020-2022) Mellon-funded Developing a Pilot Data Trust for Open Access Ebook Usage project, affectionately referred to as the OAeBU project. The BAD project is scaling workflows, infrastructure and customer support processes originally developed during the earlier project. In addition to technical refinement and scaling, BAD is developing a long-term plan for housing, maintenance, and funding of the analytics service as a sustainable community infrastructure.

The team working on BAD is truly international. The Principal Investigator (PI) team comprises: Lucy Montgomery from Curtin University (Australia); Cameron Neylon (Curtin University); Niels Stern and Ronald Snijder (OAPEN Foundation, the Netherlands), as well as community cultivation expert Katherine Skinner (Research Lead at IOI, based in the United States).

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SocArXiv Papers | A scoping review on the use and acceptability of preprints

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Abstract:  Background: Preprints are open and accessible scientific manuscript or report that has not been submitted to a peer reviewed journal. The value and importance of preprints has grown since its contribution during the public health emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic. Funders and publishers are establishing their position on the use of preprints, in grant applications and publishing models. However, the evidence supporting the use and acceptability of preprints varies across funders, publishers, and researchers. The purpose of this scoping review was to explore the current evidence on the use and acceptability of preprints by publishers, funders, and the research community throughout the research lifecycle.

  Methods: A scoping review was undertaken with no study or language limits. The search strategy was limited to the last five years (2017-2022) to capture changes influenced by COVID-19 (e.g., accelerated use and role of preprints in research). The review included international literature, including grey literature, and two databases were searched: Scopus and Web of Science (24 August 2022). Results: 379 titles and abstracts and 193 full text articles were assessed for eligibility. Ninety-eight articles met eligibility criteria and were included for full extraction. For barriers and challenges, 26 statements were grouped under four main themes (e.g., volume/growth of publications, quality assurance/trustworthiness, risks associated to credibility, and validation). For benefits and value, 34 statements were grouped under six themes (e.g., openness/transparency, increased visibility/credibility, open review process, open research, democratic process/systems, increased productivity/opportunities). Conclusions: Preprints provide opportunities for rapid dissemination but there is a need for clear policies and guidance from journals, publishers, and funders. Cautionary measures are needed to maintain the quality and value of preprints, paying particular attention to how findings are translated to the public. More research is needed to address some of the uncertainties addressed in this review.

Common Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Landscape Review – Ithaka S+R

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“Scholarly communication is a complicated sector, with numerous participants and multiple mechanisms for communicating and reviewing materials created in an increasing variety of formats by researchers across the globe.[1] In turn, the researcher who seeks to use the products of this system wishes to discover, access, and use relevant and trustworthy materials as effortlessly as possible. The work of driving efficiency into this complex sector while bringing its multiple strands together seamlessly for the reader (or, increasingly, for a computational user) rests on a foundation of infrastructure, much of it shared across multiple publishers. In this landscape review, we seek to provide a high-level overview of the shared infrastructure that supports scholarly communication. The purpose of this landscape review is to provide scoping for the array of shared infrastructure that we intend to examine in a larger project about the strategic context that has driven and will continue to drive the development of this infrastructure. That project will include a needs analysis on what parts of the shared scholarly communication infrastructure are working well and where they can be improved, culminating in recommendations for where additional or revised collective action and community investment is indicated….”

Which Nationals Use Sci-Hub Mostly?: The Serials Librarian: Vol 0, No 0

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Abstract:  In the last decade, Sci-Hub has become prevalent among academic information users across the world. Providing thousands of users with millions of uncopyrighted electronic academic resources, this information pirate website has become a significant threat to copyrights in cyberspace. Information scholars have examined the unequal distribution of IP addresses of Sci-Hub users’ nationality and emphasized the high proportion taken by users from the developed countries. This study finds new evidence from Google Scholar. Searching “Sci-Hub.tw” in the academic search engine, the author finds 531 results containing the keyword. Considering the result, the author argues that academic users in South American countries may use Sci-Hub more frequently than their counterparts in the rest of the world. Moreover, users in the Global North also rely on Sci-Hub to complete their research as well. The new evidence on Google Scholar proves the universal use of Sci-Hub across the world.

 

Conversion to Open Access using equitable new model sees upsurge in usage

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“Leading nonprofit science publisher Annual Reviews has successfully converted the first fifteen journal volumes of the year to open access (OA) resulting in substantial increases in downloads of articles in the first month.

Through the innovative OA model called Subscribe to Open (S2O), developed by Annual Reviews, existing institutional customers continue to subscribe to the journals. With sufficient support, every new volume is immediately converted to OA under a Creative Commons license and is available for everyone to read and re-use. In addition, all articles from the previous nine volumes are also accessible to all. If support is insufficient, the paywall is retained….”

Guest Post – Open Access for Monographs is Here. But Are we Ready for It? – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“At the University of North Carolina Press, we recently completed a four-year initiative to support the publication of open access (OA) monographs by university presses in the discipline of history. Through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP)—generously funded by the Mellon Foundation — we published fifty-nine titles with nineteen different presses. SHMP was unique among OA initiatives in that it did more than simply provide offset funding. It required an intervention in publication workflows where university presses and their authors had to submit to a standardized process with templated outputs that aligned with the requirements of digital platforms. The pilot recorded successes and challenges indicative of ongoing and future needs, some of them general to all OA publishing and some specific to OA monograph publishing.

There were several areas of encouraging news. The titles we published are being accessed and used exponentially more than digital editions that are behind paywalls. And standardization significantly reduced the costs required to create a high-quality university press monograph. But there were also discouraging results. Authors and presses remain deeply cautious about OA as a legitimate, sustainable mode of publishing. They are even more skeptical about the trade-offs associated with standardization. And we learned that there are serious gaps in the infrastructure needed to disseminate open scholarship efficiently and measure its impact….”