Developing from the OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBUDT)
Since 2015, an international community developed to facilitate the direct data exchange and benchmarking of open and proprietary usage data about Open Access books. Collaborators from five continents documented book metadata, impact reporting challenges, data supply chains, related standards, governance and trust frameworks.
In 2021, project stakeholders developed initial governance principles and elected an inaugural Board of Trustees to guide the development for a scholarly communications focused international data space to support automated, controlled sensitive data provisioning between platforms and services. In 2023, the Board selected OPERAS-EU to host the coordinating office of the dataspace.
Over two years, the dataspace’s governance, administration and technology were intentionally designed to support both the initial use case of distributed open science usage reporting and future extensibility and interoperability. Pilots highlighted the costs associated with dataspace support and coordination while community consultations signaled sustainable cost-recovery mechanisms in the scholarly communications market. Value proposition research signaled that as stakeholders sought economies of scale, the developing dataspace had to support governed data connectors broadly, solving other operational challenges in scholarly communications such as provisioning for AI and open knowledge graphs.
With extensibility in mind, in October 2025 the Board elected to transition from launching an “OA Book Usage Data Trust” to launching a broader “Scholarly Communications Trusted Dataspace.” Work is now underway to raise an operational reserve to launch the usage data connector service and fund the next round of development. Organizations interested in supporting this transition can contact one of our Trustees or Executive Director.