Open access (OA) to academic books is gaining momentum. Publishers are increasingly including OA in their publishing programmes and more research funders develop mandates for OA books. Simultaneously, libraries increasingly support OA book publishing programmes and infrastructures. For all the stakeholders, usage data are important. But what kind of usage data are most relevant?
In this interactive session we wish to explore together with the audience the kind of usage data and impact metrics that are considered most relevant to academic libraries.
The session will be organised in three parts:
First, it will briefly present OAPEN’s new open access books usage statistics dashboard for libraries. The dashboard provides seamless and up-to-date access to COUNTER data of the 25,000+ titles in the OAPEN Library.
Second, the presentation will share how OAPEN plans to expand its initiative through a Mellon funded project together with Curtin University (AUS) and Educopia (U.S.) https://openknowledge.community/projects/bad-project/. This project will aggregate and display a suite of usage data for OA books across multiple platforms (JSTOR, OAPEN, Google Books, Wikipedia, Twitter etc.) into one dashboard to the benefit of libraries and other stakeholders.
Third, members of the Open Access Task Force at Columbia University will discuss how usage statistics could influence their OA evaluation rubric which is currently in development. They will discuss how they might apply usage statistics presented by OAPEN to the three main areas of their OA rubric: Impact, Sustainability & Governance, and Institutional Focus.
Using interactive tools, the audience will be given the opportunity to suggest other types of usage data and impact metrics. A well-prepared Q&A session will collect comments and answer to questions raised by the audience. The total amount of feedback will be collected and used to inform the development of the above-mentioned project and future discussions on the topic.
