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Barricading an open access website – reflections on the attack on DOAB

As many of you might have noticed, last week the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) website was unavailable for several days. Sadly, the reason for this was not a technical glitch as we first suspected, but an actual attack on DOAB.

During the weekend of 21 January, someone decided to flood the Domain Name Server (DNS) of our registrar with requests for the DOAB record – a DDoS attack.

A short explanation: when you type in www.doabooks.org, your browser looks up this address in a Domain Name Server, which translates it to an IP address (that looks like, e.g., 123.123.123.123). However, when an attacker overloads the DNS with these lookups, this does not work any more. The result is that the website is working fine, but it can’t be reached.

Sadly, we were not immediately able to understand what was happening, as we did not have any previous experience with this kind of situation. Once the reason was clear, we could take measures. We moved our domain name registration to Cloudflare, a company that specialises in the protection against these kind of attacks. At the same time, we have done this for the OAPEN and the OA Books Toolkit websites as well.

Thank you for your patience with us as we navigated these new circumstances and please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused. We hope that our explanation was clear, but of course, please contact us if you have any questions or remarks.

Book Analytics Service testimonials

Don’t just take our word for it – read about how our partner presses are benefitting from the Book Analytics Service:

The Books Analytics Service has been incredibly beneficial for Big Ten Open Books.

We were able to implement our dashboard with data from several different content hosting platforms. The amount of time and intellectual energy that would have had to be spent on manually aggregating this data is significant and would not have been able to demonstrate the granularity of the interactions with our content.

Having this robust, and straightforward technology that pulls together all our data in one place has been amazing for us. Our open access content project is just in the first few months of our initial launch.

This data gathered and presented by the BAD project has allowed us to report back to our investors about the community engagement we’ve realized. Implementing the dashboard for Big Ten Open Books has been essential to our project’s success and has helped the broader academic community to realize how impactful Humanities scholarship can be when made open access. It is now a core element of our site.

We are so appreciative of the work that the BAD project staff have done to make the usage of open access content more visible. Making this information public on our site exceeds our expectations for being able to provide transparency to our investors. Thank you for all the work you do!

Kate McCready, Visiting Program Officer at the Big Ten Academic Alliance

CEU Press, with the help of COPIM, launched its open access model in 2021. Opening the Future funds the frontlist in open access by leveraging backlist title sales. The key to the success of the model will be demonstrating impact, which includes usage of the open access titles that we publish. Since we share our OA books on as many platforms as possible, aggregating OA usage across these sites and making sense of that data is time consuming and requires standardisation across the industry. The Book Analytics Service is the solution to this problem!

Emily Poznanski, Director, CEU Press

The BAD project team have made it possible for University of Michigan Press to pilot the groundbreaking Book Analytics Service in the USA. The team’s information science expertise has smoothed the bumpy task of normalizing data from the many different platforms that host our open-access books. The team has shown both innovation and a commitment to integrity and partnership. The benefits of their work are hard to overstate. Authors can now easily monitor the impact of their individual titles to advance their academic careers. Funders can use the dashboard to obtain proof of return on investments. The visualizations of global reach have reinforced support for the Press’s equitable business model that never requires author payment. As 2022-2023 Association of University Presses President, I know that many other publishers are excited by the Book Analytics Service. This is due to the expertise of the BAD project team.

Charles Watkinson, Director, University of Michigan Press and Associate University Librarian, University of Michigan Library

We have worked with the BAD project team since 2019 on the management of UCL Press book download data, including gathering, collating and presenting data on a public dashboard developed by the team. They provide a seamless and reliable service that we have not found from any other provider, and as such we regularly recommend them to other presses.

Our dashboard provides vital information about the global usage of the open access books we publish which demonstrates the success of the OA model to our institution and shows how the university’s investment in UCL Press benefits UCL. It also means authors can easily see how their books are performing, and other stakeholders such as funders, prospective authors and the wider scholarly publishing community can see the global impact of OA books, which helps to make the case for greater support for a transition to OA.

Lara Speicher, Director of Publishing, UCL Press

Laura J. Wilkinson

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8922-7839

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Everything you need to know to get started with the Book Analytics Service

Niels and I were recently at the Frankfurt Book Fair to meet with publishers and spread the word about our new Book Analytics Service (BAS). 

Laura J. Wilkinson and Niels Stern at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2023

Funders increasingly require data about the usage of open access books. This data is also useful for authors, and for explaining the case for the increased reach of OA content compared with paid content.

Gathering usage data for OA books is time-consuming, as you have to retrieve it from all the different platforms which host your content. The output formats and even what’s being counted will vary between these platforms, increasing the amount of work you need to do to synthesise the data.

The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project is the origin of the Book Analytics Service. It’s come a long way from its early days as a pilot, and the service is now functioning and hosted by OAPEN, under the same community governance model that has made OAPEN a trusted infrastructure for OA books. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Book Analytics Dashboard project (2022-2025) is focused on creating a sustainable OA book focused analytics service. We are indebted to our fantastic COKI colleagues at Curtin University for their meticulous technical development work – thank you all!

Our core idea when designing the dashboard was to make it faster and easier for you to see usage for your OA titles across a range of data sources, such as OAPEN, JSTOR, and Google Books among others. We label downloads and views from the different sources, so that clear(?) comparisons can be made between what’s being counted in different places. 

To ensure the future of the Book Analytics Service beyond the timescale of the project funding, it’s essential that we have a sustainability model to bring in enough revenue to keep it going. This is a key element of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure – see OAPEN & DOAB’s POSI self-audit.

With our project colleagues, we carefully modelled the costs of running the service, and translated this into a pricing model which takes publisher revenue into account. This cost recovery model means that if we get more publishers to sign up than are necessary to cover the costs, we can (in discussion with the community) use the surplus to develop additional dashboard features, or lower the future cost of the service. None of the revenue is paid to shareholders – as a Dutch stichting, we don’t have any – and any surplus is reinvested in our work for the community. 

Much of the cost of onboarding a new publisher to the Book Analytics Service arises from the work needed to integrate their data feeds at the start, which is why it’s not feasible to offer a free trial. However, University of Michigan Press have kindly agreed to make their dashboard and usage data open so that anyone can see it and play with the settings to see how it works – come and have a look at our demo dashboard for yourself.

At the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, some publishers asked us how the Book Analytics Service is different from commercial alternatives. Here are some of the ways in which we differ:

  • BAS is built around the book as the primary object, rather than developing a system for journals and then including books as a sidecar/afterthought.
  • BAS is hosted by OAPEN, an independent, not-for-profit organisation which can’t be sold, so our work is not at risk of being acquired and locked in by a commercial company. Learn more about our multi-stakeholder community governance and transparency in our OAPEN & DOAB’s POSI self-audit.
  • Our code is open source, allowing you to inspect, replicate, and improve it. This open box approach means you can know what’s happened to the data used in your dashboard, in contrast with opaque systems which obscure their internal workings. We present you with the collated data for your interpretation rather than producing badges or scores with no working.

Note that although our source code is open, your publisher data is private. We know that although publishers often want to see and compare themselves against others’ data, they rarely want anyone else to see their data. This is the type of question that is being explored by our parallel project, the OA Book Usage Data Trust, which focuses on the ethics and standards of data exchange.

What would you like to do next?

  • Experiment with the template Book Analytics Service dashboard (thank you for choosing to make your dashboard data open, University of Michigan Press!)
  • Learn more about how the dashboard can help you, the service levels, and pricing model. Smaller publishers may like to explore the possibility of a consortium model, in which they collaborate with other presses to share a dashboard and its costs.
  • Need help getting your metadata into the correct export format to send to BAS, or other services? Try using Thoth to create, manage, and disseminate title metadata.
  • Interested to know more about funder requirements? The PALOMERA (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) project investigates the reasons why books are only rarely mandated to be published OA by research funders and institutions within the European Research Area (ERA). PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books. Such services will also include monitoring of the usage of OA books which is another use case for the Book Analytics Service.

Ready to participate? We’re delighted to have you on board! Get started by contacting us for an initial conversation.

Laura J. Wilkinson

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8922-7839

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Open access books – measured in a context

For over a decade, there have been open access books platforms. Each of those platforms share usage data and when you are an author of an open access book, you would find that it has been downloaded a certain amount of times. But how should you interpret that number? Unfortunately, the answer is not straightforward. The usage is influenced by the language of the title, its subject, but also by the platform: not all platforms reach the same audiences; furthermore, there might be seasonable differences. For instance, usage of the OAPEN Library is lower in the months of June to August, compared to September to November.

So, it would be helpful to have some clarity. 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: the usage is either average, below or above average.

How does it work? As a proof of concept, we analysed the usage data of over 18,000 books in the OAPEN Library. Each book was assigned one high level subject, and the language was categorized as either English, German or Other languages. Each book was placed in a group that combined one subject and one language. Within those groups, we looked at the usage data, and determined whether a book was having average, more or less downloads.

Between groups, there are large differences: for instance, a German-language book on Humanities with 300 downloads is doing better than average, while an English-language book on Humanities would need to have reached at least 652 downloads to reach the same level. Another example is the difference between titles on Language in German versus other languages. Here, German-language books downloaded more than 250 times are scoring better than average. For books in other languages the bar is much higher: 385.

In this way, we can see how well a book is performing, compared to similar titles. In other words: when we consider the context of a book, we can actually say if its usage is better than expected.

Read more in the newly published article by Ronald Snijder, “Measured in a context: making sense of open access book data,” Insights, 2023, 36: 20, 1–10; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.627

PRISM & Peer Review Week: building trust in OA books through transparency of peer review procedures

What comes to your mind when you hear the words peer review? Perhaps it’s a group of academics evaluating manuscripts and papers, or maybe it’s a specific type of peer review, like open, double-anonymised, or collaborative. Some of you might even think of DOAB’s Peer Review Information Service for Monographs, or PRISM, as we like to call it.  

If you’ve never heard of PRISM or need a little reminder, for this year’s Peer Review Week (25-29 September), we at DOAB thought we’d tell you (especially you publishers out there) all about it! 

So, what exactly is PRISM? Good question! PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue through DOAB. And the best part about it? It’s completely free!  

How does it work? you may ask. Well, first and foremost, participating publishers send us their peer review information. As well as displaying each publisher’s peer review processes, we also show which process applies to which individual publication from that publisher, for complete transparency. 

PRISM is recognisable through the handy logo visible next to a publisher or the title of a publication (all you need to do is click the logo to display more information). You can also use the search query ‘peerreview.id:*’ to find all DOAB publications with linked PRISM records (of which there are over 5,200). Last but certainly not least, the PRISM API, which includes peer review metadata, allows application developers to seamlessly incorporate peer review information into other applications. 

PRISM benefits the academic publishing community by: 

  • giving librarians confidence in recommending open access publications to their patrons 
  • allowing funders and users to see key details about quality control processes of open access books, and 
  • providing publishers with the opportunity to showcase their best practices

PRISM has been around for about a year now, and we’d love for more publishers to join us as we grow and expand this free service. We’re even developing a widget for publishers to use on their websites! You can participate following these simple steps: 

  1. Check you’re a member of DOAB and join us if you’re not 
  1. Agree to the T&Cs of PRISM
  1. Provide DOAB with your peer review process(es) as described in our documentation for publishers
  1. Log in to DOAB and create a PRISM peer review submission. When it’s accepted, your submission becomes a record. If it’s rejected, the information is deleted
  1.  Attach your PRISM record to the applicable publication(s).

Don’t forget that the OAPEN Library’s participating publishers’ peer review policies are also listed on OAPEN’s website for anyone to access.  

Please reach out to us with any questions, comments, feedback, or to participate in the PRISM service at info@oapen.org

DOAB celebrates its 10th anniversary!

This year, the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), led by OpenEdition and OAPEN Foundation, celebrates its 10th anniversary. Since its inception, DOAB has evolved from an idea for indexing high quality peer-reviewed open access books and chapters to a globally used and open directory serving not only researchers and the wider scholarly community, but also the public. 

Back in 2009, following the successful example of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the OAPEN project leaders thought to create a similar resource for open access books and chapters. Discussions first took place at the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) conference in Lund in 2010.  

DOAB was officially launched at the First International Conference on OA Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences in April 2013. The difference between the OAPEN Library and DOAB is that DOAB is a directory linking to open access books and chapters on other platforms and publishers’ websites to increase discoverability, whereas the OAPEN Library is a digital library where you can access the full text. They both share a mission to increase trust in open access books and book publishing. 

DOAB becomes and independent not-for-profit organisation 

DOAB was established as a Foundation in March 2019 under Dutch Law, jointly managed and governed by the OAPEN Foundation and OpenEdition, the French national infrastructure dedicated to open scholarly communication in the SSH. The creation of DOAB as an independent, not-for-profit legal entity ensures its sustainability to continually serve the needs of the academic community, including libraries, publishers, researchers, funders, and the public. 

Marie Pellen, Director of OpenEdition, says: “DOAB is a successful example of European cooperation across borders. We are delighted to see DOAB becoming more mature and recognised as a crucial infrastructure for open science. We are grateful to CNRS, Aix-Marseille University and the French Ministry of Research for their constant support.  This common effort enables us to create a resource that serves the research community worldwide and promotes bibliodiversity in scholarly publishing.”  

In 2020, DOAB was jointly chosen alongside OAPEN for the SCOSS second funding cycle which aims to help infrastructures become more sustainable and financially independent. SCOSS encourages universities who are invested in open science and open access to support the non-commercial services on which it depends; DOAB and OAPEN are crucial infrastructures that support the transition to open access book publishing and increase trust in the industry. 

DOAB today 

DOAB is an open infrastructure committed to open science. Its main mission is to increase discoverability of open access books and maximise their dissemination, visibility and impact. All DOAB services are free of charge and all data is freely available.  

At the time of the launch, DOAB contained 750 books from 20 publishers. Today, DOAB includes over 68,000 open access books and book chapters from over 600 publishers in more than 60 languages.  

DOAB created the Trusted Platform Network to enhance the discoverability of open access books and enable a more seamless process for publishers to list their open access books by allowing them to check whether their content meets the DOAB criteria and automatically list books and chapters.   

In November 2022, the Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM) was launched to further build trust in peer review and open access academic book publishing. PRISM is a standardised way for academic publishers to display information about their peer review processes across their entire catalogue. The PRISM logo is included on title level and at metadata level.  PRISM is now integrated in the OPERAS portfolio of services and, thanks to this, is exposed in the EOSC marketplace.

Looking to the future 

DOAB is designed to improve transparency around the quality assurance practices in open access book publishing by further developing the PRISM service and intend to continue to build trust by partnering with more publishers and aggregators globally to expand the directory for researchers, the wider scholarly community, and the public to discover.  

DOAB is still mainly populated with publishers from Europe and North America, so it aims to prioritise being more globally inclusive in the coming years, supporting bibliodiversity. An important part of DOAB’s mission is to enable equitable access to global distribution for book publishers and authors, in the same way that open access books are already provided to libraries and readers globally. DOAB seeks to serve open and equitable scholarly publishing in the best possible ways. 

Explore the collection today! 

Le DOAB fête ses 10 ans !

Le DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books), piloté par OpenEdition et la fondation néerlandaise OAPEN, fête cette année ses dix ans d’existence. Né de l’idée d’indexer des livres et des chapitres de livres en accès ouvert évalués par les pairs, le DOAB est aujourd’hui devenu un répertoire ouvert utilisé dans le monde entier, non seulement par la communauté scientifique, mais aussi par le grand public. 

En 2009, s’inspirant du succès du Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), l’équipe d’OAPEN a l’idée de créer une ressource similaire pour les livres et les chapitres de livres en accès ouvert. Les premières discussions ont eu lieu à la conférence de l’Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) tenue à Lund en 2010.  

Le DOAB est officiellement lancé à l’occasion de la première conférence internationale sur les monographies en accès ouvert dans le domaine des sciences humaines et sociales en avril 2013. Le DOAB est différent de la plateforme OAPEN, car il s’agit d’un répertoire qui renvoie vers des livres et des chapitres de livres en accès ouvert se trouvant sur d’autres plateformes et sur les sites Web d’éditeurs afin d’accroître les possibilités de découverte. OAPEN est quant à elle une bibliothèque numérique qui donne accès au texte complet. Les deux ont toutefois pour mission commune de renforcer la confiance dans les livres et l’édition de livres en accès ouvert. 

Le DOAB devient une organisation indépendante à but non lucratif 

En mars 2019, la fondation DOAB de droit néerlandais est créée. La Fondation OAPEN et OpenEdition, infrastructure nationale française dédiée à la communication scientifique ouverte en sciences humaines et socialees, en assurent conjointement la gestion et la gouvernance. Doter le DOAB d’un statut juridique à but non lucratif assure sa viabilité pour continuer de répondre aux besoins de la communauté académique, y compris les bibliothèques, éditeurs, chercheurs, organismes de financement et le grand public. 

Pour Marie Pellen, directrice d’OpenEdition, le DOAB « est un exemple réussi de coopération européenne par-delà les frontières. Nous sommes ravis de voir le DOAB évoluer et s’imposer en tant qu’infrastructure incontournable pour la science ouverte. Nos remerciements vont au CNRS, à l’université d’Aix-Marseille et au ministère de la Recherche pour leur soutien sans faille. Grâce à cet effort commun, nous pouvons créer une ressource au service de la communauté de recherche mondiale qui favorise la bibliodiversité dans l’édition universitaire. »  

En 2020, le DOAB a été retenu avec l’OAPEN pour le deuxième cycle de financement de SCOSS, dont le but est d’aider les infrastructures à devenir plus durables et indépendantes financièrement. L’initiative SCOSS encourage les universités investies dans la science ouverte et l’accès ouvert à soutenir les services non commerciaux dont elle dépend ; le DOAB et l’OAPEN sont des infrastructures essentielles qui soutiennent la transition vers la publication de livres en accès ouvert et renforcent la confiance dans ce secteur. 

Le DOAB aujourd’hui 

Le DOAB est une infrastructure ouverte engagée dans la science ouverte. Il a pour mission d’accroître les possibilités de découvrir des livres en accès ouvert et de maximiser leur diffusion, leur visibilité et leur impact. Tous les services du DOAB sont gratuits, tout comme l’accès à l’ensemble des données.  

À son lancement, le DOAB contenait 750 livres provenant de 20 éditeurs. Aujourd’hui, il inclut plus de 68 000 livres et chapitres de livres en accès ouvert de plus de 600 éditeurs dans plus de 60 langues.  

Le DOAB a créé le Réseau des plateformes de confiance pour favoriser la découverte de livres en accès ouvert et faciliter la tâche des éditeurs dans le référencement de leurs livres en accès ouvert. Ils ont ainsi la possibilité de vérifier si leur contenu correspond aux critères du DOAB et de référencer automatiquement les livres et chapitres de livres.   

En novembre 2022, a été lancé le service PRISM (Peer Review Information Service for Monographs) afin de renforcer la confiance dans l’évaluation par les pairs et l’édition de livres académiques en accès ouvert. Le service PRISM permet aux éditeurs académiques d’afficher des informations standardisées sur leurs processus d’évaluation par les pairs pour l’ensemble de leur catalogue. Le logo PRISM figure au niveau du titre des ouvrages et des métadonnées. PRISM fait maintenant partie du catalogue de services d’OPERAS, ce qui lui permet d’apparaître sur la marketplace de l’EOSC.

Nous préparons l’avenir

Le DOAB doit permettre d’améliorer la transparence sur l’assurance qualité dans l’édition de livres en accès ouvert. Cela passera par la poursuite du développement du service PRISM et une confiance accrue grâce à des partenariats avec des éditeurs et des agrégateurs du monde entier pour étendre le répertoire et le faire connaître à la communauté scientifique ainsi qu’au grand public.  

Le DOAB regroupant surtout des éditeurs d’Europe et d’Amérique du Nord, l’objectif dans les prochaines années est de l’ouvrir davantage au reste du monde afin de favoriser la bibliodiversité. Offrir aux éditeurs et aux auteurs et autrices de livres un accès équitable à la diffusion mondiale, de la même façon que ont déjà fournis des livres en accès ouvert aux bibliothèques et lecteurs et lectrices à travers le monde, est une partie importante de la mission du DOAB. Le DOAB a pour ambition de répondre de la meilleure façon possible aux besoins d’une édition scientifique ouverte et équitable. 

Explorer la collection

A guarantee of OAPEN’s independence: we cannot be sold or acquired 

We’ve just published the 2022 stakeholder report for OAPEN (which is a Dutch stichting, or foundation). The financial section of this report is based on the annual accounts for 2022 which have been audited by a registered accountant specialised in Dutch law.

There are two key elements to extract from the annual accounts. Firstly, OAPEN made a surplus of €103,000 and secondly, the OAPEN Board decided to allocate €100,000 of the surplus to a contingency fund. Both elements are in line with the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). One principle says: “It is not enough to merely survive, it [the infrastructure] has to be able to adapt and change.” For 2022 the OAPEN Board then decided to follow the principle stating that: “a high priority should be generating a contingency fund that can support a complete, orderly wind down” by adding to its contingency fund most of the surplus, namely €100,000.  Learn more about our POSI self-audit for OAPEN and DOAB.

If OAPEN again manages to create a surplus in 2023, the Board will again have to decide how to make best use of the surplus. The contingency fund is not yet complete, but other investments could also be considered. However, the important point is that any surplus that OAPEN will generate will always be re-invested in OAPEN. This money cannot leave the organisation but can only be used to pursue the mission and the objectives of OAPEN. This follows the Dutch law for foundations.  

You may already be familiar with the American concept of a 501(c) organisation, which is a type of nonprofit organisation that is exempt from some federal income taxes. A Dutch foundation goes much further – it is an autonomous corporate vehicle that has full legal personality. Its main aim is to benefit the foundation’s mission or purpose, and not to create a profit for the founders.  

A Dutch foundation is an independent legal structure, is represented by a Board of Directors (which can be in the form of a Managing Director and a Supervisory Board as is the case for OAPEN), and is not controlled by shareholders, partners, or members. Furthermore, we are a not-for-profit rather than a non-profit because if we operate successfully we may well make a profit (termed a surplus because we are not a commercial organisation), which is then reinvested in our activities. 

A foundation cannot be sold or taken over. This means that OAPEN is guaranteed to remain independent. A foundation can only be dissolved by a decision of the Board. Any credit balance of the dissolved foundation must be used in line with the objectives of the foundation. 

The Articles of Association of a foundation specify: 

  • Its name, including the word stichting
  • Its purpose or mission 
  • Procedures for appointing and removing officers 
  • Location 
  • Decision-making procedures 
  • Procedures and payments in the event of dissolution 

Learn more about the OAPEN Articles of Association, OAPEN Bylaws (Managing Director), OAPEN Bylaws (Supervisory Board), and how a stichting works.  

Niels Stern & Laura J. Wilkinson

Laura J. Wilkinson

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8922-7839

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

This blog post was initially published by Kathryn Napier on the the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) website on May 30, 2023.

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). 

I lead the project’s technical team, which is based at Curtin University and has close links to the Curtin Institute for Computation. The Curtin team is working closely with OAPEN to support the development of the governance and sustainability model needed to ensure the long-term stability of a dashboarding service. The whole project team meets weekly, coordinating a series of teleconference meetings and coworking sessions across hemispheres and timezones.

Cameron Neylon (Curtin University), Rebecca Handcock (Curtin University), Kathryn Napier (Curtin University), Sînziana Păltineanu (OAPEN Foundation), Laura J. Wilkinson (OAPEN Foundation), Ronald Snijder (OAPEN Foundation), Lucy Montgomery (Curtin University), Katherine Skinner (Formerly Educopia Institute, now IOI), Niels Stern (OAPEN Foundation) meeting online in March 2023.

Consult, listen, iterate

Engaging with community feedback productively has demanded willingness, not just to consult stakeholders, but also to listen and iterate technical directions. The decision to move away from Elasticsearch Kibana in favour of Looker Studio during the first year of the project is an example of how this process of consulting, listening, and iterating has worked in practice. 

In 2022, when the BAD project kicked off, an important first priority was community consultation and the development of the first annual Technical Roadmap. A draft technical roadmap was made available for community comment and feedback in June-July 2022. The draft technical roadmap had a dual purpose: making technical systems and plans visible to stakeholders; and inviting those stakeholders into a conversation about where effort and resources should be focussed. 

The original project plan placed a heavy focus on standardising technical workflows developed during the previous OAeBU project, in order to support scaling of a dashboard service. This included the use of ElasticSearch Kibana, a system chosen because of its ability to allow for fine-grained user access roles and permissions, and well suited to keeping the information contained in dashboards private. However, ElasticSearch Kibana is less well-suited to a publisher-focussed dashboard service that engages with the value of dashboards to support advocacy and public communication. Being able to easily make dashboards public, embedding dashboards within publisher websites, and simple, visually appealing user interfaces required a different solution.

An example of pilot dashboards produced using ElasticSearch/Kibana during the OAeBU project.

Community consultation and feedback in the early stages of the BAD project highlighted important differences between the primary use cases imagined during the OAeBU project, which focussed on keeping data private; and the needs of users focussed on external messaging and public sharing of visualisations. Improving user experience needed to become a higher priority. Rather than simply standardising ElasticSearch Kibana workflows, the BAD dashboards needed both a visual and technical revamp. Technical work shifted focus to producing dashboards that can be used both publicly for marketing and communication and internally for reporting by publishers.

An example of the BAD dashboards produced using Looker Studio during the first year of the BAD project (see the template dashboard here, and the University of Michigan Press’ dashboard embedded in their website here).

We therefore shifted our focus on technical priorities in the updated technical roadmap (released in January 2023) to investigating alternative dashboarding solutions, and produced a template dashboard using Looker Studio, a dashboarding solution offered by Google. This template dashboard formed the basis of focus group community consultations that took place in the first quarter of 2023, and the dashboard design will continue to iterate and incorporate feedback through the life of the BAD project.

Virtual, in-person, hybrid: working as a truly global team

The first year of the BAD project presented both challenges and exciting opportunities. Coordinating project management and deliverables across a multinational and multidisciplinary team is not a simple exercise, and we have discovered that a combination of detailed in-person meetings and workshops with regular teleconference meetings has resulted in the best outcomes for the project. The lightbulb moment that occurred in late 2022 where we shifted our technical priorities and dashboarding system would not have occurred without a series of in-person meetings.

Laura J. Wilkinson (OAPEN Foundation), Ronald Snijder (OAPEN Foundation), Lucy Montgomery (Curtin University) and Cameron Neylon (Curtin University) meeting in person for a series of project workshops in The Hague, October 2022.

This shift in technical focus came at an ideal time within the first year of the project. We are now well placed to further refine the dashboard design through the feedback received from the focus groups (detailed in the draft technical roadmap for year 2), which will also inform the continued development of the dashboarding services sustainability, governance and financial models. We will continue to endeavour to build the best service we can with the combined talents from our multidisciplinary team.

Kathryn Napier

Learn more about the BAD project

Books in a bubble

Nowadays, we refer to “bubbles” as online places where no information from outside is allowed in. But in this instance, the opposite is true: the bubbles are a tool to help visualise how well one set of books is performing, compared to other sets of books. The OAPEN Library is an open online platform, and recently we have audited ourselves, based on the POSI principles. However, apart from an infrastructure, it is also a library.

When our collection passed the 20,000 titles milestone, we felt it was time to assess our collection: how well does it perform? That is not a simple question to answer: assessments of libraries and their collections are taking place within a certain context. OAPEN is not a ‘traditional’ library with a mixed collection of physical and digital publications, and our collection criteria are perhaps a bit different: books should be peer reviewed and have an open license, but we welcome all languages and subjects. We are not linked to one ‘parent organisation’, but try to serve everybody.

Three types of stakeholders support the OAPEN Library: publishers, funders and libraries. Both publishers and funders contribute to the collection by making publications available. They will be interested in the dissemination of the books and chapters. For libraries, the composition of the collection will be paramount. How do the titles on offer fit within the information needs of their patrons?

The evaluation of the OAPEN collection should consider these two aspects. The dissemination of books and chapters is measured through the number of downloads – based on COUNTER R5 conformant data. The composition of the collection is measured among two axes: subject and language. Both dissemination and the content-related aspects are paired to the number of publications. So, we have to take into account three dimensions: number of titles, number of downloads and average downloads per title. On top of that, we need to look at the differences between languages and subjects. All in all, a complex mix.

Our solution was to use three-dimensional pictures: the bubbles.

Usage of social sciences books depicted as three-dimensional bubbles
Social sciences in the OAPEN Library collection

The bubbles display the composition of the collection and how its readers make use of it. Visualisations like this help to tell a complicated story in a simple way; a powerful instrument to guide the further development of the OAPEN Library.

More details can be found in this open access article:

Snijder, Ronald. ‘Books in a Bubble.: Assessing the OAPEN Library Collection’. JLIS.It 14, no. 2 (15 May 2023): 75–92. https://doi.org/10.36253/jlis.it-498.

Open Access Books – Helping small libraries think big

Over the last couple of years, the OAPEN Library and Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) collections have grown significantly. We have seen more open access (OA) books being added, and welcomed new publishers from around the world. Much of the continued momentum for OA books has been made possible thanks to the support of a growing library community: investing in OA book programmes, infrastructures and services that enable not only the availability of these books in an OA format, but also their discoverability, preservation and integration into everyday workflows. 

Today, we are speaking with David Dusto, Electronic Resources Librarian at the Elizabeth City State University to learn more about their engagement with OA books.

David, thank you for agreeing to share your story with us. Libraries worldwide increasingly include our collections in their library catalog. These range from large academic libraries to specialized libraries attached to research institutes as well as smaller colleges. For those unfamiliar with Elizabeth City State University, could you share a bit more about the University and its library?

Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) is a public university that is part of the University of North Carolina system. With just over 2,000 students, ECSU is one of the smallest universities in the system, and it is also a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and approximately ⅔ of the enrolled students are minorities. Historically, ECSU started in 1891 as a teaching college, and still has a large education school. Today, ECSU is also known for its innovative aviation program. The largest U.S. Coast Guard base in the United States is also located in Elizabeth City, so we have many military students as well. The G.R. Little Library is the campus library. We have a small staff of 5 full-time librarians and two other permanent staff, and we work to meet the research and information needs of all the student body.

Could you share more about your role in the library and how you first became familiar with open access books?

I am the Electronic Resources Librarian, but my predecessor held the title “Serials Librarian”, which shows how rapidly academic libraries are changing. I first became familiar with open-access books while I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina School of Library and Information Science over a decade ago, and have been avidly interested in the subject of both open access books and journals since then. I am also involved with the university’s institutional repository (NCDOCKS), which serves as an open-access collection for material published by students and employees at the university.

To what extent are OA books a part of your library’s strategy today?

ECSU is a small university and our budget for collection development is limited, but I have found that I can supplement our existing eBook collections by locating high-quality open-access collections and adding them to the library website and discovery system. This has been enormously helpful – usage statistics indicate that a considerable percentage of eBook views through the library website are from open-access items. Therefore, despite the small size of the library and its resources, I have been able to build a large and useful online collection for our students and faculty.

How can OA books further support your library and the institution’s mission?

It’s important for institutions such as DOAB to exercise quality control in what they add to their collection, in order for it to be as useful and relevant as possible. Ensuring that links are working correctly in OA directories will save librarians like me a lot of time and aggravation in the long run, as we won’t have to deal with authentication issues and access limits that we are often confronted with when working with subscription-based collections.

In recent years open access for books has gained momentum, yet starting from a small base with a long road ahead still. Do you have any particular expectations or wishes for the open access book community and how this may evolve in the coming years?

I hope to see more institutional support for open-access book publishing. The focus for OA materials that I have seen from universities is primarily focused on journals rather than books, and I would be pleased to see increased support from both university presses/publishing houses and also from smaller institutions that may not have their own press. This would give authors from smaller universities the opportunity to publish and raise the prestige of their own institution, rather than going through a central system press. Similarly, I would like to see increased support for open course materials, such as open-access textbooks. As textbook costs continue to rise, having open course materials not only available but also adopted by instructors would go a long way towards easing the financial burden for students while simultaneously increasing access to materials.

 

OAPEN & DOAB POSI self-audit

It is with great pleasure and sense of achievement that we share with you today our POSI self-audit for OAPEN & DOAB (download OAPEN & DOAB POSI self-audit PDF).

As you may know, OAPEN and DOAB are separate but interconnected infrastructures for open access books, governed by the OAPEN Foundation and DOAB Foundation respectively. In practice, our small team of nine people works with both systems on a daily basis. But since the two organisations have different governance, we’ve carried out a self-audit for each. We hope you agree that seeing the two self-audits side-by-side helps to compare and contrast the ways they operate.

Update: learn more about OAPEN’s governance structure and why we can’t be sold or acquired.

Our POSI self-audit process

Like the world of research in which our work is immersed, we started this project by reading everything we could about POSI and the self-audits already undertaken by other organisations (the POSI Posse).

We did the first draft which was then shared internally for comments and discussion with colleagues, and then we took the document to our official governing bodies (OAPEN Board of Directors and DOAB Supervisory Board) for their views and feedback.

What did we learn?

POSI obliged us to take a good look at our practices, and address areas where we had fallen short. In some cases, we had good intentions, but as these weren’t documented anywhere, we couldn’t cite them. In others, we needed to tidy up our procedures. Some of these changes could be made immediately, while others will take a while longer. We documented these aspects in the “Next steps” column of our self-audit.

Some of the matters which gave us pause included:

Governance > Non-discriminatory membership

Is OAPEN a membership organisation? This became the subject of some debate, as we speak of publishers “joining” OAPEN. However, a publisher entering into a service agreement with OAPEN does not “buy” them a special voice or role in our governance. Our terminology for libraries is clearer, as we call them “supporters”. This has sparked efforts to improve our language to make it clear that there is no relationship between payments of any sort and governance roles.

Governance > Transparent operations

This part of the self-audit made us realise that we could improve by making more prominent on our website the OAPEN Bylaws and Articles of Association, and DOAB Articles of Association and Terms of Reference for the DOAB Scientific Committee. It was nice to be able to have this as a quick win!

Governance > Cannot lobby

At the heart of the matter is the difference between lobbying and advocacy, and whether an infrastructure should engage in such matters. We believe that any mission-driven organisation is going to have reasons to promote particular issues or approaches. For example, part of the mission of both OAPEN and DOAB is to promote open access to books. Could the Oxford English Dictionary help us?

  • Lobby, v. To influence (members of a house of legislature) in the exercise of their legislative functions by frequenting the lobby. Also, to procure the passing of (a measure) through Congress by means of such influence.
  • Advocate, v. To act as an advocate for; to support, recommend, or speak in favour of (a person or thing).

We debated the reasoning behind this element of POSI, and we also asked one of the three POSI authors, Cameron Neylon, about it. He replied: 

“The point is not to advocate or seek regulatory enclosure. For instance, advocating that OAPEN membership be required for a funder to provide BPC funding would fall within the intended scope here. Generally we felt that communities should advocate, infrastructures should support implementation. Obviously missions do involve goals and speaking to them but the argument was that lobbying in the sense of seeking regulations that benefit the infrastructure would be a red flag.”

Cameron Neylon, via email

Having also discussed this with members of the POSI Posse, we learned many of them have interpreted this Principle in the political and financial sense; that infrastructure organisations should not seek to influence legislation or regulation.

It is perhaps useful to remember that we advocate in support of our mission, a mission that is shared by many in the scholarly communications community. This is therefore a goal which is of benefit to the community in general, as compared with lobbying in the narrow interest of shareholders. This ties in well with the Principle of “formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind down” – if we no longer have the support of the community, we will take steps for an orderly wind-down, rather than continuing to exist for our own sake as a company might do.

Governance > Living will

We suddenly became aware of what it really means to have a handover plan. In our publisher agreement, it is noted that if the OAPEN Library ceases to exist, the rights granted to the OAPEN Foundation under this agreement may be transferred to the KoninklijkeBibliotheek Nederland [KB, National Library of the Netherlands, where the OAPEN office is based] exclusively for purposes of depositing the Publications in the KoninklijkeBibliotheek. Although there has long been this arrangement, we’ve never actually developed a documented process that would help the KB to put this into practice. This has spurred us to investigate how to develop such a plan.

Sustainability > Goal to generate surplus

As a not-for-profit organisation, we still have a goal to generate financial surplus. However, the surplus never leaves the organisation, it is always re-invested. The surplus is used for different things, such as building our contingency fund, new technical developments, and upgrading our existing technical infrastructures; as well as employing new colleagues to support our expanding operations and increased engagement with the community. OAPEN and DOAB have been considerably under-staffed for years, and it has long been an explicit goal to create surplus to enable us to hire more people, thus ensuring a resilient and dynamic organisation.

Sustainability > Goal to create a contingency fund to support operations for 12 months

OAPEN follows this principle by setting aside surplus revenue each year to build its contingency fund. The exact size of the contingency fund should be established by the OAPEN Board on a yearly basis. The contingency fund should cover at least 12 months of operational costs for OAPEN. At the time of doing the self-audit, OAPEN is still building its contingency fund.

Insurance > Open data

But of course our websites are openly licenced! Oh, wait… we need to state this clearly. We took action and updated both the OAPEN website and DOAB website, and OAPEN Library and DOAB Directory with CC BY 4.0 licence details. Et n’oublions pas que le site de DOAB est également disponible en français, donc il faudrait aussi le mettre à jour.

How we will follow up

Our aim for the POSI self-audit is that it will be a living document that will accompany our existing strategic plans and updates for both organisations. We plan to review our self-audit every few years to ensure it stays accurate. Meanwhile, it performs the essential everyday task of providing you, the scholarly community, with our public commitment to POSI and allowing you to question, challenge, or even encourage us on any of its aspects. We look forward to hearing from you at info@oapen.org!

Niels Stern & Laura J. Wilkinson

Laura J. Wilkinson

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8922-7839

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Top findings from the BAD focus groups

The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) Project (2022-2025) is focused on creating a sustainable open access (OA) book focused analytics service. During this project, we are scaling up from our prototype dashboard to a fully functioning service. New to BAD? Learn more about the people, background, and work packages in our project overview.

In the first quarter of 2023, we carried out a series of focus groups with publishers to test some ideas and get their feedback to help inform our future decisions.

We really enjoyed meeting the participants and we thank them warmly for their participation. So, what did we learn from our interactions with them? You can jump to the full findings on Zenodo (which includes our methodology and instruments), explore the BAD template dashboard (currently featuring University of Michigan data – thank you U of M!), or continue reading here for a summary.

How will the Book Analytics Dashboard help publishers?

Our participants told us that this data would provide them with a better understanding of the usage of their OA books across different countries, including which titles are most popular, how language and translation affects circulation, and comparing users’ preferences for full books vs chapters. Participants largely agreed that one of the most important aspects of the service is its ability to combine, normalise, deduplicate, and visualise OA data so that it can be quickly used and trusted. 

“Our current articulation of OA is narrative-, not data-driven, so it’s very labour intensive”

Some participants also hoped the data might help inform their publishing decisions; others hoped it would inspire acquiring editors and other decision makers to become more engaged with usage data. We also heard from participants that having tangible dashboards and reports to show people would be very helpful in getting editorial boards, authors, and funders to understand OA impact. Publishers acknowledge that this needs to be done with appropriate context and explanation, but also note that this type of data is increasingly requested by authors and funders.

A key value proposition of BAD is that it allows easy synthesis and consolidation of disparate data sources, which is otherwise a very manual process that is often conducted by publishing staff members.

Features of the Book Analytics Dashboard

Publishers appreciate being able to download visual elements of the dashboard and export data from it. They value the accuracy of the data sources used, allowing them to make comparisons. Participants encouraged us to maximise this by making provenance information available so that users know that we’re providing standardised and good-quality data. 

The focus group participants identified a number of features we can improve or add, and these will be reviewed by the technical team for inclusion in the technical roadmap for years two and three of the project (see the technical roadmap for year one).

Publishers helped us explore which features would be present in different levels of the service, for example a standard dashboard with additional features as a premium offer (such as an API, integrations, or more detailed reports). It would also be possible to include additional ONIX streams (for example, from non-OA titles) as an à la carte option.

Financial sustainability

Though few participants are immediately ready to commit financially to the dashboard service, they widely acknowledged that such data and dashboards will be essential for their operations in the not-too-distant future. We discussed a number of options for pricing, and there was agreement that there should not be a flat fee for all publishers.

Community governance

We asked publishers what they wanted and expected in terms of community governance qualities or characteristics for BAD. To our surprise, many participants were reluctant to commit to being involved due to bandwidth constraints. There was a strong preference for consultative rather than democratic engagement with BAD governance. This is quite a contrast with other open scholarly infrastructures where community participation in governance of the organisation is considered a key value. Perhaps this is because people realise how much time and effort it requires to stay abreast of developments and think deeply about these aspects of work; it also might stem from cultural differences in scholarly publishers (as compared with librarians). It could also be because of the participants’ high levels of trust in OAPEN, the suggested long-term home for BAD.

Publishers welcomed being part of a community around OA books usage data as long as that did not demand they undertake governance responsibilities. They appreciate periodic stakeholder reports and annual meetings, as well as opportunities to contribute to a technical roadmap – though participants do not think that they should make decisions about technology.

“We can make suggestions, but should not fly the plane.”

As we expected, participants told us that it was important that the OA books data is provided in trust, not sold on, and is only used appropriately. Transparency is key; as is the not-for-profit status of this service.

Many publishers were happy with the idea of BAD becoming an OAPEN service under OAPEN’s existing governance. 

Next steps

The focus groups findings have given us plenty to think about! Our technical team are currently considering all the feature requests and tweaks that we discovered, and our findings will also directly feed into our work around sustainability and modelling different pricing possibilities.

Laura J. Wilkinson & Katherine Skinner

Learn more about the BAD project

Laura J. Wilkinson

ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8922-7839

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