Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Peter Potter. Peter is Vice President for Open Access Publishing at Paradigm Publishing Services and Executive Director of De Gruyter eBound, a 501 (c) (3) foundation that owns and operates UPLOpen.

 The scholarly publishing community has achieved something remarkable over the past decade: the creation of functional, open-source technology for open access book metrics. What began as scattered discussions about the intractability of tracking OA ebook usage has evolved into multiple complementary projects that have collectively laid the groundwork for a comprehensive technical infrastructure for collecting and sharing usage data that can support the needs of publishers, authors, libraries, and other stakeholders in the scholarly communication system. Not surprisingly, the challenge that lies ahead is achieving long-term sustainability as these projects attempt to launch as viable services in today’s environment of diminished funding opportunities.

Why This Matters

Some Scholarly Kitchen readers may wonder why all the fuss. Can’t book publishers build on, or adapt, the same infrastructure that has emerged to track OA journal analytics? The short answer is no. There are numerous reasons for this, but ultimately they all come down to fundamental differences between the book and journal publishing industries—differences that have only intensified as both industries have grown and evolved along different paths since the advent of digital technologies and digital distribution. As Michael Clarke and Laura Ricci explain in the OA Books Supply Chain Mapping report, “while the OA books business has borrowed many of the practices and protocols of journals, and often the same customers, books are distributed through a different set of suppliers and intermediaries, each with their own competing interests.” Whereas journal publishing is now dominated by a handful of major commercial STEM publishers and infrastructure providers, scholarly book publishing continues to encompass a wide array of humanities and social science (HSS) players—commercial and non-commercial; small, medium, and large—with limited capacity for collective action.

It is the case that the COUNTER Code of Practice defines standard ways to measure usage data across different platforms, and it is increasingly being adapted for reporting OA ebook usage, but the book publishing community still needs to address some unique challenges to collecting and sharing book usage data. These challenges stem from the ways books can be divided up (e.g., by chapter) and shared across a multiplicity of platforms and unofficial sites. As explained in the OA Books Supply Chain Mappingreport, “Journals (even OA journals) are often distributed on a small number of platforms (often only one or two) and the primary distribution platform is almost always that of the publisher. Books favor a multichannel strategy, where each title can be accessed on a larger number of platforms and formats and in many cases the publisher does not even offer a platform of its own.” Compounding the problem is the fact that DOIs are not consistently or universally used for books. (Because book publishers continue to rely heavily on print sales, DOIs are not as relevant as ISBNs.) In such an environment, OA books can, and do, proliferate on the web far beyond the purview of publishers, making it practically impossible (and legally difficult given privacy requirements) to track down and collect, let alone analyze, usage data.

Progress

Given these unique challenges, it has been heartening to see stakeholders in the book community come together in pursuit of workable solutions. One area where notable progress is happening is that of community governance around the ethical, automated sharing of data at scale. Here the key development has been the effort to create what was initially conceived of as a Data Trust for OA eBook Usage as laid out in the 2019 Mellon-funded BISG white paper Exploring Open Access eBook Usage:

Members of a data trust for OA monograph usage data would agree to make their data available to others who are members of the trust. Members would access normalized data through a user-specific dashboard or interface, while the trust would provide benchmarking data in a manner that respects contributor confidentiality and privacy. The data trust could also allow certain anonymized data to be extracted, typically through an agreed-upon API, for independent analysis.

In the years since the release of the BISG report, the OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBUDT) project has been funded twice by Mellon, during which the project has spearheaded extensive community consultations with publishers, libraries, aggregators, and platform providers. One important outcome of these consultations has been the collective decision to shift the focus of the project away from the original data trust idea to that of a more decentralized “data space”—a federated environment for data sharing thatallows participants to retain their “data sovereignty” in line with design principles for International Data Spaces (IDS) and emerging IDS certification specifications.

Other outcomes of the project include the first version of a participant rulebook (2024) to guide data space participation, and, in 2025, the successful development, documentation, and piloting of a proof-of-concept data space deployed via an AWS cloud by Think-IT to support pilot data exchanges among Ubiquity Press, University of Michigan Publishing, Punctum Books, JSTOR, and LibLynx. The next step, in order to come into alignment with the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), is to transition from a research project to a service in which operations are supported by sustainable revenue sources.

Another area of progress has been in building the technological service infrastructure to support the collection of large amounts of usage data as well as synthesizing, consolidating, and communicating that data in ways that adequately convey impact to publishers, authors, funders, etc. Here, two projects, in particular, stand out:

The Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) is another Mellon-funded research project (building on the data trust project) led by the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI) in partnership with OAPEN and Educopia. BAD has focused on creating an operational dashboard that can aggregate standardized ebook usage data from multiple sources (e.g., OAPEN, Google Books, Fulcrum, Crossref Event Data, and JSTOR) and present the data in an intuitive interface that publishers can easily share with authors and other key stakeholders. A prototype of the dashboard is currently being used by the University of Michigan Press and Big Ten Open Books. 

A complementary analytics initiative called OPERAS Metrics has been developed with EU funding by OPERAS, an international not-for-profit association (AISBL) based in Belgium that has been visionary in its efforts to support open scholarly communication in HSS fields. Growing out of the earlier HIRMEOS project, OPERAS Metrics is an analytics service designed specifically to surface usage metrics for authors and readers. It normalizes book identifiers (ISBNs and DOIs) and provides modular “drivers” to collect common usage data such as views and downloads from multiple platforms (e.g., Google Books, OAPEN, and UPLOpen) while also tracking alternative metrics (e.g., citations and Wikipedia mentions) and integrating open-source tools such as the annotation platform hypothes.is. It then aggregates these data and allows for their access, display, and analysis from a single access point. Much of the code was developed by Ubiquity Press and Open Book Publishers and it is currently employed to display usage metrics for books on UPLOpen and on the Open Book Publishers site.

Since 2022 the OPERAS project and the Book Analytics Dashboard project have been working together on delivering transparent, trusted, and community-controlled analytics tools and services to support the transition to open access for scholarly books.

Critical Milestones

Taken together, these three projects (OAEBUDT, BAD, and OPERAS Metrics) have achieved several critical milestones: 

• Technical Infrastructure: All three projects have created working systems for aggregating multi-source usage data, moving beyond the theoretical to support actual analytics services.
• Community Governance: Through extensive consultation and pilot partnerships, they have developed governance models that prioritize community ownership over vendor control.
• Publisher Adoption: Real publishers are using these services, creating the user base necessary for sustainable operations.
• Open Standards: The projects have developed interoperable approaches that reduce vendor lock-in and enable broader adoption.

Most significantly, these initiatives have been building trust within the scholarly publishing community. Some publishers who were initially skeptical of sharing usage data have become advocates for collaborative approaches. Libraries have recognized the value of transparent analytics with data provenance. Even commercial platform providers have begun to engage constructively with these community-driven efforts.

The Challenge of Sustainablity

Despite achieving these milestones, much uncertainty remains. Both OAEBUDT and BAD complete their current round of funding from Mellon in 2025, and while OAEBUDT is continuing to develop its sustainability model through community consultations, the transition to operational funding is not guaranteed. The BAD project, which is now being operated by OAPEN as the Book Analytics Service, is currently exploring possible ways forward, including collaboration and coordination with other initiatives. OPERAS Metrics, dependent on European Commission funding, is pursuing the possibility of becoming an European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), which would provide a more stable source of funding.

This funding challenge is not unique to OA book metrics. Scholarly infrastructure projects worldwide struggle with the transition from grant-based development to operational sustainability. The “valley of death” between proof-of-concept and sustainable service has claimed many promising initiatives. What makes the current situation particularly acute is the simultaneity of the funding challenges across all three major projects.

There is also need for more publishers and platform providers to step up. While support has been growing across the scholarly publishing community, some players remain hesitant to invest in open infrastructure — e.g. publishers for whom OA books still make up a relatively small percentage of their lists, or commercial publishers/platform providers hoping sometime in the future to explore the commercial potential of analytics.

The temptation might be to assume that someone else will step forward to take the lead, or that the technical infrastructure can simply be maintained indefinitely at minimal cost. This assumption is dangerous and historically inaccurate. Successful scholarly infrastructure requires several key ingredients: ongoing development, community engagement, technical maintenance, governance oversight — and, most important, leadership.

A Call for Community Action

The scholarly publishing community has demonstrated that collaborative, community-owned infrastructure for OA book metrics is not only possible, but also valuable. Publishers are using these services. Libraries support them. Funders have invested in them. Many of the technical challenges have been solved, and the governance models have been tested and refined. Usage metrics are the “currency” of open access, demonstrating the additional reach and impact of open forms of dissemination. Ensuring that there is a reliable, auditable mechanism for aggregating and sharing book usage is a major driver of support for open access among authors, publishers, and funders.

The solution lies not in preserving multiple standalone projects, but in recognizing that their success has created the foundation for something larger: an interoperable community-governed infrastructure for OA book metrics that builds on each project’s strengths while achieving the scale and efficiency necessary for long-term sustainability.

What remains is a collective choice: Will we allow this infrastructure to fragment and decay, or will we invest in its evolution into the kind of sustainable, community-owned service that can serve the scholarly communication ecosystem for decades to come? The answer depends on actions taken in the coming years. Funders must prioritize sustainability funding for scholarly infrastructure. Publishers and libraries must commit to supporting services that benefit the entire community. Project leaders must embrace collaboration over competition. And the broader scholarly communication community must recognize that infrastructure investments are not one-time grants but ongoing commitments to the tools and services that enable open scholarship.

Acknowledgment: The author wishes to acknowledge and thank those who read and commented on this post, including Christina Drummond, Lucy Montgomery, Pierre Mounier, Niels Stern, and Charles Watkinson.