Funding Announcement: $1.2 Million Mellon Grant to Develop Core Scholarly Infrastructure For Community Governed Sharing of Quality Interoperable Open-Access Book Usage Data

From a Joint News Release:

Paolo Manghi, CTO of OpenAIRE, is co-leading an international team led by University of North Texas that has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to develop core scholarly infrastructure for the community governed sharing of quality, interoperable, open-access book usage data.

Open access (OA) materials are free to read online and are distributed without licensing restrictions. While standards such as the COUNTER Code of Practice support OA book usage reporting, opportunities exist to streamline OA usage data sharing, governance, and curation across public and private sector partners worldwide.

Since 2015, stakeholders in the OA Book Usage (OAEBU) Data Trust project have gathered to make book usage data more accessible for libraries, presses, publishers and others interested in scholarly impact. Dimitris Pierrakos (Product Manager of OpenAIRE’s UsageCounts service) served on the technical advisory board for the 2020-2021 project phase prior to joining the Data Trust’s Board of Trustees. As Co-PI on the newly awarded 2022-2025 project phase, Paolo Manghi will co-lead the effort to develop data governance and administration mechanisms for the ethical exchange of digital book usage data between public and private book publishing stakeholders.

The funding from the Mellon Foundation will support multi-stakeholder development and documentation of community norms pertaining to book usage data sharing and governance. Leveraging emerging European models for International Data Spaces, the team will facilitate book publishing, discovery and impact metric stakeholders in defining participation terms for organizations sharing or receiving usage data via the OA Book Usage Data Trust.

The three-year project is being conducted in partnership with Co-Investigators affiliated with OPERAS, the University of North Texas, and Johns Hopkins University. It will develop the governance building blocks needed for a 2025 public launch of the data services streamlining data exchange and provide economies of scale to all who create usage data analytics and dashboards.

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Dashboards, Data Files, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing