Building a trusted framework for coordinating OA monograph usage data

Problem statement Stakeholders in monograph publishing are adapting to a landscape that includes online, digital, and open access possibilities, requiring a reassessment of their strategic goals. In particular, stakeholders face challenges in moving beyond reporting that focuses on print sales toward capturing and articulating the value of investments in open access (OA) monographs in the context of users who engage with their books across multiple sites and formats. Granular and comparable information on users and usage of OA monographs has the potential to support these stakeholders in adapting their acquisition, marketing, and sustainability strategies to the new opportunities and demands of an evolving scholarly communication ecosystem. However, data about how OA books are being used may include sensitive commercial information as well as information about users that must be handled carefully in order to safeguard privacy. In addition, there are also major issues of scale: the resources required to collect and analyse this data are often cost-prohibitive for individual stakeholders, and the possibilities of benchmarking and understanding usage data in the context of wider patterns and trends depends on access to aggregate data from multiple stakeholders, which individual stakeholders are unlikely to have access to. As such, a community approach to handling data about OA books brings potential for achieving economies of scale and for taking advantage of network effects, both of which help to address resource challenges facing individual stakeholders and to allow comparison and benchmarking to the benefit all stakeholders in the system. Successful collaboration will require thoughtful engagement with issues of trust, the development of shared technical standards, and the development of requirements for the validation of data and information. This is a classic collective action problem; its solution, therefore, requires the development of a trusted framework for coordination between all the relevant stakeholders. To lay the groundwork for this, we develop a case for the need for action and a description of the landscape, and we propose a ‘community data trust’ as a way forward for the monograph community.