OA usage reporting: Understanding stakeholder needs and advancing trust through shared infrastructure

Abstract

The complexity of usage reporting for Open Access (OA) content continues to grow, particularly with content syndication to organizations such as ScienceDirect and ResearchGate, which deliver content across multiple platforms at an unprecedented scale. What kind of usage data do diverse stakeholders (including libraries, publishers, authors, and editors) need? Can the work done to support OA book usage data analytics use cases inform OA article and data use cases? What standards and policies are required to ensure the usage data is accurate and meaningful? What infrastructure is needed to collect and disseminate this data effectively and efficiently? This paper brings together four different perspectives to consider these questions: an OA publisher, a research infrastructure, an emerging usage data trust, and a usage analytics service provider. The authors walk through what is known, and then start to unpack the questions for which they do not yet have answers. Their goal is to inform the community’s understanding of the challenges ahead and, hopefully, start to lay the groundwork for constructive policies and shared solutions.