Advancing to Launch by Developing IDS Governance Building Blocks

July 2022-June 2025

Sponsored by the Mellon Foundation

This project aims to formalize the Data Trust effort’s community-governance mechanisms, quantify data trust participation benefits in terms of an ROI, and understand the full operational costs related to an international data space for OA book usage. In addition to establishing mechanisms to coordinate global community governance, infrastructure and stakeholder engagement, a scalable budgetary model will be created. Most importantly, community workshops and consultations will be facilitated to create a multilateral data-processing and stewardship rule book for the OA book usage data trust participation. Project outputs will pave the way for: 1) the transparent, trusted processing of open and privileged usage data, 2) streamlined usage data aggregation, and 3) ethical usage data benchmarking.

View the prospectus, project announcements and outputs.

Principal Investigators

  • Christina Drummond, University of North Texas

  • Prodromos Tsiavos (2023-Current); Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE (2022)

  • Yannick Legré, OPERAS

Project Staff

  • Ursula Rabar, OPERAS

Advisory Board Members

  • Brian O’Leary, Book Industry Study Group (BISG)

  • Charles Watkinson, University of Michigan Press

  • Jo Lambert, JISC Usage Statistics Portal and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS-UK) (thru January 2025)

  • Jon Elwell, EBSCO

  • Maria Zucker, De Gruyter (thru August 2023)

  • Niels Stern, OAPEN and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

  • Peter Potter, TOME Project then De Gruyter (after August 2023)

  • Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Project COUNTER (thru April 2024)

  • Vivian Berghahn, Berghahn Books

Due to conservative award expenditures and administrative staffing changes in the first two years of the award, the PIs secured Mellon Foundation approval to add work packages to the project. These included: 1) an IDS Technical Gap Analysis to assess existing scholarly communications focused platforms and services capable of providing core functional IDS network services, and 2) the development of a proof of concept, minimum viable data space to understand the value added by applying the data space protocol to data governance of live data connections between public and commercial OA book usage data providers and recipients.

Consulting Team Contributors

  • Clarke & Esposito

  • 67 Bricks

  • Ice Miller LLC

  • Think-IT

Technical Pilot Partners

  • University of Michigan Publishing

  • Punctum Books

  • JSTOR

  • LibLynx

  • Knowledge Unlatched

  • Ubiquity Press & Paradigm Publishing Services

This proof of concept pilot will explore whether an IDS can create both internal value and economies of scale and trust for the multi-platform exchange of COUNTER compliant open access (OA) scholarly book usage data at the title and chapter level.

Late 2024, the Board of Trustees approved staff to pursue research into the extensibility of this infrastructure to support other types granular, real-time multi-platform data exchange.

Stakeholders interested in exploring such research partnerships for 2026 and beyond should contact us.