 Hi there, I'm Christina Drummond, and I'm the Program Officer for the Open Access E-Book Usage Data Trust, which you may have heard of, referred to as OEIBU. And over the past two years, we've been working on piloting some of the infrastructure for the data trust, and I'm here today to provide a quick project update on what we've been up to and where we're going. My project supported generously by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a number of objectives for this two-year period. The first was to pilot some of the infrastructure, especially open-source technology, to see what we would need to facilitate the exchange of usage data for open access books and to understand a number of the issues surrounding the processing and aggregation of that data, as well as the presentation of that data through data dashboards. As a key component of that, we're also looking to outline the personas and use cases, work that has been completed, which we'll talk about momentarily. We also had the opportunity to investigate, document, and report out the data ecosystems surrounding OEI book usage, as well as explore some of the governance models and issues that would relate to the sustainability for a data trust. So we wanted to do that with community stakeholders, and so we've also had a number of community consultations and open community forums to help us along in this work. So with those of you who haven't seen about a project, you can visit our website at jacopia.org slash data underscore trust, and on there you'll see the wide range of partners that we've been working with. I'm really honored to have had this opportunity to collaborate with organizations from over five continents on our advisory board or technical advisory group and over 100 individuals through our design thinking workshops, because together we're really looking at all of the issues that relate to this ecosystem of open access usage data. We've been lucky enough to work with those who are working on the standards for reporting, the individuals who are working at the front lines, who are, you know, creating dashboards and providing usage reports, as well as publishers and presses upstream that are putting forth these books and are looking for actionable information that they can use to inform their decision making. As I noted, one of the things that we've accomplished is to document the data ecosystem for open access usage data, specific to OA books. And so you'll see here this work that was completed by Michael Clark and Laura Ritchie. There's a really wonderful report that points out some of the unique attributes to open access books, especially in comparison to journals and what happens with that usage data in terms of the data flows and the data ecosystem. So what are the different types of stakeholders working with usage data? One of the things that I really like to point out as a visual thinker myself is that there are some wonderful workflow diagrams that show how the usage data passes through this ecosystem, all the way from where that data originates with the end user, with the reader, and how that passes through the catalogs, the sales and content platforms, distributors, aggregators, and of course upstream with the publishers, presses, who create those books and the funders upstream. One of the things I'll note on this particular image, if you download the report, you'll see where these points of usage data aggregation are, multiple arrows coming together, which currently mean that those particular stakeholders in this ecosystem have to pull together and aggregate that information to provide those reports in analytics, which is very time consuming, which is not a clear process and requires a lot of deep technical knowledge both about open access usage data and what information can and cannot be compared and why. As I noted, we did host a number of design thinking workshops earlier this year and we asked stakeholders in their own peer groups, so commercial publishers, university presses, as well as libraries and scholars, and the many publishing platforms and services. We brought these groups together to ask the question, what do you do with usage data? In that process, we were able to document not only the staff personas that work with usage data, but also the specific queries, questions, and ways they envision using this data for data driven decision making. What was really wonderful in this process is after we went through that experience with each of those stakeholder communities, we were able to look across our findings, which are documented in the report you see here, to then pull out where those commonalities are. And as you'll note here on the screen, publishers and libraries share a number of common needs around usage data, especially with respect to impact and usage reporting and providing that for their institutions as well as for their scholars that they're working with. So in addition to that, though, both publishers and libraries are looking at the open access book usage data to inform their operational strategies and everything from budgeting to dissemination strategy. And so with that knowledge, I think it's important to note here that usage really is becoming a critical piece of that kind of decision making at these institutions. Of course, the other thing that we noticed here, and this comes back to the data trust, is that right now, every one of these organizations is responsible for compiling, comparing, aggregating multiple usage reports that are provided in multiple ways. They could be accessed by a dashboard provided by a platform service or publisher. They could be accessed in spreadsheets or CSV files that are provisioned in email. And right now, every one of these institutions is expending the time and resources to basically manage, curate, and aggregate as feasible that usage data, which is incredibly time intensive, cost intensive and requires a very unique set of expertise, which unfortunately means that organizations who don't have that organizational capacity are unfortunately disadvantaged and don't have the same ability to leverage usage data as organizations that perhaps have larger teams focusing on this usage data management and curation piece. Once we had an understanding of the use cases and the staff personas, we were able in our project to actually work with four university presses, Springer Nature and the WAPN network to actually look at what their needs would be in visualizing the data to give us a deeper understanding of how they're trying to pull this data across platforms, a usage data across platforms together. So we have undergone a kind of technical proof of concept with these organizations to create dashboards for them to pull together their usage data from multiple platforms into a single reporting and dashboard view so that they can work with that to test what that might look like. In the process of that project, we also were able to pilot a number of technical controls to think about how we can pull together these usage data streams from individual platforms and services that cannot be combined or necessarily made open in public. So one of the things that we know what we're doing in this project is we're working with privileged data. So an individual institution has access to usage reports for their scholars for their collections and what we had to do is be able to bring that data together in a trusted fashion while securing it and making sure that it is not accidentally made open. That said, we're bringing it alongside data that is open. And so one of the key things that we had to do is think about from the data trust perspective how to operationalize that data stewardship. And in the course of this project and our proof of concept, we were able to pilot a number of those technical controls from an access privacy and cybersecurity framework. But we realized there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to come up with our community standards around and ethical guidelines really to provide those guardrails and inform the contracts eventually would have to come into place with participants of the data trust, especially with respect to how the data is processed, how the data is used downstream. And if there are guidelines we need to be think about as we're creating these big data flows with respect to individual scholars and what that might accidentally mean and potential impacts it could have on scholarly freedom. So to take a big step back as we've been talking about there's kind of a number of foundational research pieces that we've been doing here to plan for an eventual data trust. And we've just gone over a number of reports and research projects that we've had not only to understand the data issues that are at play and the challenges we have in aggregating and linking this information, but also to document the ecosystem and the various stakeholders and roles that are at play. We also of course, as I just noted, piloted some of that open source infrastructure and conducted some research and development to see what those issues are from a technical level. That said, we also then bracketed this with building out our community of stakeholders to inform these decisions as we go. But the last piece of this puzzle over the last two years has been to really think about what the roadmap is going forward. We've had the ability to hire legal counsel to do an initial legal analysis for us, which we'll talk about momentarily, as well as an environmental scan of the different players, both on the dashboard provisioning side as well as the data exchange and some initial business model canvases for both a usage data dashboarding service and a usage data exchange focused on open access. So with all of this background research in hand, our advisors and our advisory board or technical advisory group and also our open community forums were able to help us to pave the path forward for our project for the next three-year period. One of the key things that influenced where we were going was legal analysis and surfacing some emerging legislation coming out of the EU, namely the Data Governance Act, that really talks to the role of neutral data brokers and how these critical organizations within industries have to be neutral. What is required to be neutral and to allow a space where organizations can provide data and trust that that data will not be used in a way that causes them harm. One of the things that we learned in our project by pulling together usage data feeds, even if we protect it, even if we think through access controls, if that data is used by the organization that collected it to create dashboards that perhaps rank data providers or perhaps rank aggregators in terms of performance, that can potentially cause conflicts and it could potentially cause challenges for those data providers who may not want to be seen at the bottom of that list. So in line with what we're hearing coming out of Europe, one of the things that our project identified, so the data governance legislation that is coming out of Europe, basically says if you are in the role of exchanging data, acting as a data intermediary, such as a data trust, you cannot also provision dashboards and analytic services. That needs to be done separately. So with that in mind, what our project had decided to do and as advised by our leadership is to actually split into two here in the next phase. So what's happening is all of the work that we've learned around dashboards and how to present the usage data is going to be continuing on in a demonstration project headed up by Cameron Nealon. And this is really going to be focused on filling that niche where small to medium publishers have a need for those data dashboards. And they're going to be continuing on with all the work that was created in this pilot to your period to actually see if they can turn that into a sustainable service with its own sustainability model and fee structure. On the other side, we still need to figure out how to build economies of scale and to build the trusted scalable mechanisms that will facilitate not only the sovereign data connectors between those who are provisioning the open access usage data and those who want to use that such as a dashboarding service. That component of exchanging, linking, aggregating, processing usage data is something that we're hoping to move upstream and continue with within that usage data trust collaborative. So both of these efforts are currently planning right now for their next phase to start next April and to go for another three year period. And so if you're interested in either of these, please reach out Christina at jacopia.org or through our website and we'll get you connected with the team. With respect to the usage data trust, it has over the past quarter and a half been able to map out what its mission to service model looks like and the specific impacts it's trying to achieve through the usage data trust on that kind of aggregation processing side. I'll note that key among those are to reduce the overhead required by each individual right now in that data curation and management role and making the making a way forward for a trusted usage data processing across these parties. The hope is to actually achieve an extensible richer model for this usage data so that the end of the day we can have more timely and more granular usage data for open access books available in this ecosystem and thereby enabling better decision making from all parties across you know both the publishers and presses as well as the libraries and the many platforms and services that work between them. The hope is to adopt something called an international data space which you'll see the graphic here on the bottom left from the International Data Spaces Association and these frameworks and models are actually emerging standards in Europe. They're coming out of the Gaia X series of projects and are in their third fourth versions right now and actually emerging as global standards for how to create an industry focused data exchange at that level and how to create these trusted connections and really provide the infrastructure to ensure trust and to ensure that the the contracts and how data should be processed and controlled is actually built into the system. So this is where we're going to be going forward in the next three years is to actually adapt and pilot this international data space model for open access ebooks specifically and the hope then being that as you see here on the right those connectors to data consumers we can line up efforts such as any data dashboards efforts to potentially benefit from much of this data linking and exchange occurring upstream. As I noted the data trust itself really does act as a data intermediary in this model and the hope is for us to create that global space for open access ebooks where competitors can really cooperate whether they are providing usage data or they are relying on usage data. We want to facilitate those economies of scale in the middle and so that not every individual organization has to go through these steps but we can actually have shared infrastructure in the middle to relieve that burden on all parties. The key here is really trust and reciprocity and that's why within the next period of the data trust effort we're going to be bringing together stakeholders to create this rule book if you will for data stewardship to guide the contract development around how open access usage data is shared, is processed and is secured. So with that I'll just note for those of you who are interested in the international data space model and how we're going to be applying that to open access book usage if you want to reach out know that this is where we're going to be going for the next three years really looking at how we can take this particular model coming out of Europe and use it to enable trusted data stewardship with as much data sovereignty as possible and facilitate that processing and linking in the middle through shared infrastructure so that as the data you know those who are consuming the usage data and relying on it we can relieve that burden of data curation and management by addressing things upstream and hopefully also improving the quality of usage data and the timeliness of that as well in the process. Thank you so much for listening I appreciate you joining me for this update.