[Lucy Barnes]

This thread aims to facilitate discussion on book usage and its measurement — a vital, difficult and sometimes contentious topic!

Ask questions, share posts and articles, discuss developments: the floor is yours.

[Lucy Barnes]

A few recent posts and articles to get things started:

• What’s in a number? A closer look at Open Access readership data, Part One and Part Two by Laura Mesotten, a deep dive into book usage data and its presentation at Leuven University Press
• These reference a post of my own from late last year, What We Talk About When We Talk About Book Usage Data
• And of course there is the recent white paper from Springer Nature and COARD, Diversifying readership through open access: A usage analysis for OA books (look out for our forthcoming conversation with two of the paper’s authors, Ros Pyne and Cameron Neylon, in our boOkmArks/Open Conversations About OA Books’ series on 6th October)

Thoughts on any or all of these welcome!

[Sebastian Nordhoff]

FWIW, our bookdownload figures are available from here as csv: https://github.com/langsci/opendata/blob/master/bookdownloads/langscidownloads.csv

We made some analyses, but they are not really conclusive:

Downloads over time: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2015/08/12/access-stats-for-open-access-books/

Difference between OMP hosting and OAPEN hosting: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/langsci-press/2017/03/09/access-statistics-from-oapen-and-omp/

Relative downloads for the first 24 months after publication: https://twitter.com/LangSciPress/status/1238128202524037126

[Christina Drummond]

Invitation to inform an OA Ebook Usage Data Trust pilot

On behalf of the OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) Data Trust pilot project (https://educopia.org/data_trust/), I want to welcome all to contribute to our on-going development of global use-cases for OA book usage data. Anyone can join the conversation and inform the development of the global pilot data trust by joining our project’s stakeholder working groups through this form.

I am also happy to share project updates as we go if there is interest.

About our project: Supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we are working to implement the recommendations documented within the 2019 “Exploring Open Access Ebook Usage ” white paper published by the Book Industry Study Group.  Through December 2021, we will engage the community to develop and test infrastructure, policy, and governance models to support a global data trust to facilitate cross-platform reporting, analytics, and visualization of usage data on open access (OA) monographs. Our international, multi-stakeholder effort aims to operate a secure usage data exchange and access-controlled data dashboards to support analytics that align with the priorities of authors, presses, publishers, and others while respecting emerging ethical norms for the use of metrics.

[Tom Mosterd]

Hi Christina,

Thanks for sharing the invitation for this great initiative here! Please do feel free to share any updates on the project here as it would certainly interest myself and I’m sure many others in the Network.

[Rupert Gatti]

A new working paper looking for altmetric advantages in OA Books and Book Chapters:  Michael Taylor, “Open Access Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: an Open Access Altmetric Advantage” preprint on arxiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10442” This paper examines the altmetrics of a set of 32,222 books (of which 5% are OA) and a set of 220,527 chapters (of which 7% are OA) indexed by the scholarly database Dimensions in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Both OA books and chapters have significantly higher use on social networks, higher coverage in the mass media and blogs, and evidence of higher rates of social impact in policy documents. OA chapters have higher rates of coverage on Wikipedia than their non-OA equivalents, and are more likely to be shared on Mendeley. Even within the Humanities and Social Sciences, disciplinary differences in altmetric activity are evident. The effect is confirmed for chapters, although sampling issues prevent the strong conclusion that OA facilitates extra attention at whole book level, the apparent OA altmetrics advantage suggests that the move towards OA is increasing social sharing and broader impact. “

[Christina Drummond]

Happy OA Week. The OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) data trust project is celebrating by releasing two of our project’s draft outputs for community review.

Today, BISG released our project’s draft report of the OA book supply chain, prepared by Michael Clarke and Laura Ricci. To quote the press release:

The draft report is being distributed broadly to solicit both community and industry feedback on its content. The current version includes assessments of key stakeholders and intermediaries, applicable and missing metadata standards, metadata elements specific to open-access works, and a summary of gaps and opportunities in the supply chain for open-access books. Those gaps and opportunities include:

• Journal-based standards and models are a poor fit for OA books
• The supply chain is built for paid access and incentives are aligned for paid access – not necessarily for OA
• Distribution processes are complex, and do not easily handle changes to a title’s OA status
• Existent standards and practices are not yet firmly established for OA monographs, and some are insufficient
• The large and growing number of platforms that deliver OA books to end users creates challenges for usage reporting

The draft report also includes maps of the key data transfer standards and usage capture and reporting within the current open-access supply chain for books.

On behalf of the OAEBU Data Trust project, I invite you to contribute your comments directly to the draft to inform the final version and help us spread this call for comments via social media with the tag #OAEBU.

[Christina Drummond]

Greetings Everyone. Over the past year, the OA eBook Usage (OAeBU) Data Trust effort hosted human centered design inspired workshops and activities to surface how scholars, publishers, libraries, platforms and services want to use OA ebook usage data. The resulting report captures both specific reporting query interests as well as aspirations for usage data analytics applications. The draft report is under public review through 10 July. Please feel free to email me your feedback or add comments directly to the draft at: https://bit.ly/OAeBUDataUseCases_Draft .

The final version of the OA Book Supply Chain Mapping report I mentioned previously is now published on Zenodo: https://bit.ly/OAeBUSupplyChainMapping.

Enjoy!

[Christina Drummond]

FYI: the OA eBook Usage Data Trust effort is moving towards establishing formal community governance next year to work alongside a Secretariat support staff. The project just released an RFP for an organization to host the Secretariat (and the project) in the next phase. You can learn more and access the RFP via Kevin Hawkin’s announcement . You can also register for the OAeBU Data Trust’s open community call on 8 September to learn more.

Please help us spread the word among your networks as we truly hope to find a wonderful partner to support the Data Trust as it evolves in its next phase.

[Christina Drummond]

Hi All – the OA eBook Usage Data Trust effort is now seeking global nominations for an inaugural Board of Trustees to guide the effort in its next phase. You can learn more here and nominate yourself or another through 3 December 2021.

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