APC Aggregation: Data Model and Analytical Usage (by Richard Jones) | Jisc Monitor

"Starting from the spreadsheets developed in the Jisc Collections TCO project, which aimed to identify and collect key APC information, we have been working to create a generalised data model which would allow us to build a coherent aggregation upon which to build useful analytics. These spreadsheets are focussed on an individual institution’s knowledge of the APCs they have paid or contributed to, the funds they paid from (e.g. RCUK, COAF), the funders of the work, and some basic bibliographic information. Inherently spreadsheets have limitations in the data they can represent – as a tabular format they struggle to represent repeatable entries (e.g., multiple authors per article) or hierarchical information (e.g. multiple funders each with grant codes). In our work we aimed to produce a format that could handle such structures, and also to allow for a combination of ad hoc and formal identification of entities. For example, authors may be identified by name – an unreliable identifier – but they may also be identified by email address or ORCID; similarly institutions may have organisational identifiers in Ringgold or ISNI. Furthermore we wanted to describe the data – wherever possible – with existing standards or vocabularies, and to that end relied heavily on the RIOXX profile and – where RIOXX did not already provide a term – the DCMI terms. Wherever fields did not appear in either of these places we have taken the liberty of inventing our own terms, on the assumption that standardisation for these does not already exist, since we are ourselves breaking new ground. A full representation of the data model at time of writing can be found here, and we won’t dissect it in detail in this post. The key things to note about it are ..."