Understanding OA Ebook Usage: Toward a Common Framework | Charles Watkinson, Kevin Hawkins, et al.

Understanding OA Ebook Usage: Toward a Common Framework

Watkinson, Charles; Hawkins, Kevin; Montgomery, Lucy; O'Leary, Brian; Neylon, Cameron; Skinner, Katherine

http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/143840

"...The authors of this proposal intend to convene a structured community conversation around usage tracking for OA ebooks. This conversation would focus on the challenges of identifying and aggregating relevant information from different platforms, analyzing what has been gathered in ways that respect user privacy, and communicating relevant information about usage to stakeholders (including authors, their publishers, their parent institutions, and their funders). As well as looking at strictly quantitative information (such as COUNTER-compliant usage data) we will explore more qualitative “story-telling” indicators, such as the altmetrics which are being collected by providers such as Altmetric.com, Plum Analytics, and CrossRef. Altmetrics are indicators of online engagement derived from tracking identifiable mentions of a particular publication in a variety of digital venues including social media platforms, mainstream and niche news publications, syllabi, and policy documents....

Schedule of Major Activities

The proposal is structured as a three-part engagement that would (a) identify the challenges in understanding the usage of OA ebooks and recommend a strategy for resolving them (research component); (b) refine these recommendations and create buy-in through a consultation exercise, conducted via online survey and an invited workshop (consultation component); and (c) publish a white paper including a framework for further action (dissemination component).

The research component would be led by Curtin University associate professor Lucy Montgomery of KU Research. The KU Research team includes Lucy Montgomery, professor Cameron Neylon, and associate professor Nic Suzor. Together, the members of this team have been doing important work to investigate issues of OA visibility, discovery and use of open access scholarly books; as well as the strategies and principles needed to support effective governance and mobilization of community data resources....

Suzor (Queensland University of Technology) is examining questions of data governance and management, to identify a route toward “data trusts.” The concept of a data trust builds on the observation that data relating to the uses of scholarly works is held by many different stakeholders within the scholarly communication system. Individual libraries, open access repositories, journals, indexing services, and aggregators each have access to some data about how scholarly resources are being used. Each of these stakeholders also possesses different internal technical capacities. Comprehensive and reliable approaches to measuring the uses of OA books requires shared protocols and understanding for data management, exchange, and access.

We will investigate how the needs of various stakeholders can be best reconciled in building a “data trust” or shared data commons, with clear rules for participation and access to data. We will work with participants to identify specific requirements and a road-map for the development of consensus-based protocols that address these needs. Ultimately, the successful development of a sustainable data trust will require a set of access and interchange protocols that protect sensitive information while ensuring that new participants have a strong incentive to provide access to the data they hold in exchange for access to aggregated benchmarking and longitudinal, geographic, and sector-specific insights.

The three purposes of this consultancy by KU Research would be to produce two documents (a landscape survey and an “action plan provocation” – also sometimes referred to as a “straw man”) ..."