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Providing transparency and building trust: the Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM) 

In the summer of 2021, DOAB started a new service in beta phase: PRISM (Peer Review Information Service for Monographs). PRISM’s goal is to provide transparency about the peer review process that applies to the books in DOAB. Services such as PRISM can support research integrity and help build trust in open access academic book publishing. 

From beta to launch 

DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books) is a community-driven discovery service that indexes and provides access to scholarly, peer-reviewed open access books and helps users to find trusted open access book publishers. PRISM, provided by the DOAB Foundation as part of the OPERAS Service Catalogue, was tested in 2021. Several open access academic book publishers participated in the testing phase. We are very grateful for their feedback, which resulted in fine-tuning of the service, and preparing the aimed launch of PRISM in the last quarter of 2022. 

How does PRISM serve our different stakeholders (publishers, libraries, funders, and researchers)? 

PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information on DOAB about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. At the publisher level, all their peer review processes are visible (as they may have more than one process in use across all their series and titles). At the level of an individual publication, the peer review process applied to that work is displayed. 

  • If you’re a publisher, PRISM helps you display the peer review process that has been applied to works in your collection. This helps you showcase how you apply best practices in peer review.  
  • If you’re a librarian, PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given work. This will give you confidence in recommending the work as a reliable source to your researchers and students.  
  • If you’re a funder, PRISM gives you fuller information about the research outputs you’ve funded.
  • If you’re a researcher or a general reader, PRISM allows you to see the quality control process that applies to a given work. This will give you more information about the publisher. 

How to participate in PRISM 

Currently, we are preparing the launch of PRISM. This launch will be phased, where we will gradually invite publishers of open access academic books to join us. Stay tuned for more details.  

In anticipation of the launch, publishers can prepare by gathering information about their peer review process(es), as this information will needed to create a PRISM record: 

  • The title for the peer review (in order to differentiate between peer reviews) 
  • Is the document peer reviewed? Yes/No  
  • What is being reviewed? Proposal/Full text/Section  
  • What is the level of openness/anonymity between author(s) and reviewer(s)? Double-anonymised/Single-anonymised/All identities known
  • Who conducts the review? Internal editor/Editorial board member/External peer reviewer/Crowd or open review  
  • At what stage is the peer review being conducted? Pre-publication/Post-publication 
  • Are the review comments published? Yes/No  
  • Who takes the decision to publish? Publisher/Books or series editor/Scientific or Editorial Board 

Keep up-to-date with the development of the PRISM service by subscribing to our newsletter or following us on Twitter: @DOABooks (and look out for #DOABPRISM!). 

By Laura J. Wilkinson, Tom Mosterd and Lotte Kruijt

The OAPEN Dashboard – a new partner service 

During the UKSG 2022 Annual Conference held from May 30th to June 2nd in Telford UK we officially launched the OAPEN Dashboard1 – a new analytics service for our library members, publishers and funder partners to help them gain a deeper understanding of the usage of open access books.  

Over 179 publishers, libraries and funders are using the dashboard today and we expect to welcome more users over the coming months. The dashboard service includes data for the entire OAPEN Library which is home to over 24,000 open access books that see over 1 million COUNTER-conformant downloads per month.  

The OAPEN Dashboard, includes unique features and functionalities that allow its users to gain a better sense of the uptake of open access books globally, regionally and locally. Next to this users can also look at usage by discipline or apply other filters – here we take a closer look at the perspective of a library user.  

Figure 1 – Library dashboard: title view 

As shown in figure 1 – from a library perspective, users can apply filters to change the ‘ending month’ for which they’d like to access the data, filter by specific funders, publishers, or item type (full book or book chapter). This allows library users to gain usage insights and run reports on subsets of the full collection of 24,000+ books.  

Figure 2 – Library dashboard: geolocational usage 

For libraries, the dashboard can be used to gain insights into both institutional usage (based on IP-ranges) and geolocational usage. While libraries are accustomed to measuring usage based on their IP-ranges, insights into geolocational usage offers another unique functionality helpful for understanding the uptake of open access books. Open access books, due to their free nature, do not require users to register and authenticate themselves prior to accessing these books. This enables students, researchers, and readers generally to use these books from home, a local coffee place, or a coworking environment. With this dashboard, a library user can gain insights into the regional usage of open access books, capturing on- and off-campus usage – setting their preferred radius ranging from 20 to 500 kilometres.  

To view the OAPEN Dashboard in action, have a look at one of these two-minute demonstration videos for publishers, funders or libraries

Share your thoughts on the dashboard and next steps 

Throughout this year, we will be presenting the OAPEN Dashboard service at conferences around the world. We invite our stakeholders to provide feedback and to learn more about how insights into open access book usage may help them. Next to this, we are excited to start working with colleagues at Educopia and Curtin University on the recently introduced Book Analytics Dashboard project, with more news on this becoming available soon. 

To learn more about the OAPEN Dashboard service please contact Ronald Snijder (r.snijder[@]oapen.org). 

  1. Developed by Trilobiet (https://www.trilobiet.nl/)