During the 2020-2022 pilot project the Curtin team developed systems for gathering information about open access books and their usage from multiple data sources. Data relating to the uses of open access books was captured and presented in a series of online interactive visualisation dashboards, which we developed in collaboration with five publishers; and one OA book platform.

We worked with the following partners to develop and test pilot dashboards:
The University of Michigan Press
Wits University Press
UCL Press
ANU Press
SpringerNature
OAPEN

Data sources captured during the pilot included general bibliographic data from public datasets (Crossref and OAPEN) and usage data from multiple platforms (OAPEN, JSTOR, Google Books, Google Analytics, UCL Discovery). Data from these sources is integrated with publisher data via the book-specific metadata standard, ONIX.

Scalable, automated workflows were developed in order to allow data to be continuously refreshed within the dashboards.

The online dashboard enables pilot project dashboard partners to see the usage of the books they have published in terms of views, downloads and online mentions and events. Pilot project dashboard partners can also view which countries and institutions are using their books, and which subjects are represented in their open access book collections.

During the pilot dashboard partners were only able to see data relating to their own books and collections. However, the University of Michigan Press has chosen to share their dashboards publicly.

Link to the public dashboards embedded in the University of Michigan Press website:

• https://ebc.press.umich.edu/impact/#oa-book-usage

Direct link to the University of Michigan Press public dashboards:

• https://tinyurl.com/umpress-public