Our partners share their insights on the rationale behind the need for reporting  

4 May 2021 by Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director OA Switchboard 

with contributions from Stacey Burke (American Physiological Society), Colleen Campbell (Max Planck Digital Library, ESAC, OA2020), Todd Carpenter (NISO), Helen Dobson (Jisc), Matthew Goddard (Iowa State University), Marten Stavenga (John Benjamins Publishing Company) and Ivo Verbeek (Elitex) 

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Open Access (OA) output is growing year-on-year (see OASPA's annual survey and ESAC's Market Watch), and there is widespread belief that research will function better if results are made openly available to the community. This growth necessitates, as a priority, the development of infrastructure to streamline communication between stakeholders and enable the fulfilment of OA publication-level arrangements. The founding partners of the OA Switchboard felt that for OA to be supported as the predominant model of publication, a practical solution was needed, mission-driven and thriving on collaboration.

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Today, the OA Switchboard is live, supports many use cases, and can be called on as and when needed, or integrated into stakeholders’ systems and workflows. With launch customers and founding partners we are currently collaborating on a number of  use cases as a priority. The first one is ´Reporting Made Easy´, and is all about reporting from publishers to institutions/consortia and funders.

We took a step back to speak with some of our partners about the rationale behind the need for a standardised, structured and validated data format, delivering real-time, situational authoritative data from the source. We’re grateful they agreed to share their views and experiences. These partners are Stacey Burke (American Physiological Society), Colleen Campbell (Max Planck Digital Library, ESAC, OA2020), Todd Carpenter (NISO), Helen Dobson (Jisc), Matthew Goddard (Iowa State University), Marten Stavenga (John Benjamins Publishing Company) and Ivo Verbeek (Elitex).

We asked our interviewees to answer five questions:

1. What is the underlying need for ‘reporting’?

2. What is the minimum set of metadata required to achieve that goal?

3. What sources (systems) capture and manage these (meta)data? Is it possible to extract the data?

4. What makes a ‘standard’? What’s the benefit of a ‘standard’? How to get there?

5. How does the OA Switchboard make reporting ‘easy’? How does it work, end-to-end and real-time?

Read a small selection of what they have to say, followed by the full interview responses below.

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“Structured data and reports are an essential basis for managing the transition of the scholarly journal publishing market to open access-based business models”, says Colleen Campbell. Helen Dobson adds: “Institutional reporting on publication outputs, particularly open access outputs, is frequently requested by both external stakeholders, such as funders, and internal stakeholders...” For a society, Stacey Burke says: “Academic publishing is an essential part of our mission… Ensuring the Society can support the publishing needs of our community with the OA pathway they need to meet funder requirements and make their published research more widely available requires accurate data and precise connections to that data.” Marten Stavenga: “For a publisher with a portfolio in social sciences and humanities, a sustainable economic model to transform the subscription-based portfolio to OA is not straightforward. In order to model our options internally, to discuss them with our library clients and to manage the roll-out, we need data and reports for both internal and external use.”

For a minimum set of metadata to achieve the goals, Matthew Goddard states: “While standards like the ESAC recommendations provide a surer guide to what will serve the community as a whole, the elements we require are article title and DOI, journal title and ISSN, corresponding author name and e-mail address, and cost where applicable.” For Jisc, Helen Dobson adds to this list: article type, institution of the corresponding author, funder data and license. The current ESAC recommendations also include: complete statement of the author’s affiliation to the paying institution, date acceptance and publication.

On the question regarding source systems, Todd Carpenter says: “One challenge is that there are a lot of legacy systems in our ecosystem—both on the publisher and library side—that were not built to talk to other systems, particularly in the way that the demands of an OA exchange might require.” Marten Stavenga adds: “We’ve started manually, but will want to automate the collection, combination and transformation into JSON. There are simply too many different sources and too many different types of data.” Stacey Burke: “Societies operate differently and many technology solutions were established to support membership business so the systems did not 'talk' to each other. APS was able to assist in this data conversation through the integration of GRID...”

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“Over the last months we’ve helped various publishers connect to the OA Switchboard via a so-called ‘custom connector’” says Ivo Verbeek. “This involved sourcing and combining data from not only different systems, but also of varying nature... The biggest challenges were finding common identifiers across the sources and the (lack of) interoperability of legacy systems. PIDs help and enable!”

Todd Carpenter from NISO says: “A core feature that makes a standard a standard, is its application. Whether a technology is formally approved or not, the key in determining whether something is a ‘standard’ is the extent to which people use the technology.... A core requirement is that common need, or common business rationale which drives the standard’s use by stakeholders.” Helen Dobson adds: “Agreement and usefulness 'make' a standard, such as COUNTER.”

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“OA Switchboard engages all of the stakeholders…” says Colleen Campbell. “...there is obviously the operational element: OA Switchboard facilitates the creation of a common language… and a common way of communicating (via shared infrastructure). This brings transparency and, ultimately, the economic benefits of efficiency and cost-effectiveness.” Helen Dobson adds: “OA Switchboard also contributes to the process… to get standardisation of reporting. It funnels knowledge and experience, and takes a global approach, based on best practices.”

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“The OA Switchboard makes reporting easy in a number of ways. Real time – on any given day, we can know where we stand with each publisher connected to the Switchboard… Standardized – OA Switchboard’s standardized messaging protocol means that we don’t need to spend time synthesizing widely variable reporting formats, or manually filling in the gaps of missing information. Flexible –the reporting data goes where we want it” as Matthew Goddard sums it up.

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Read on for their full answers to our five questions!

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1. What is the underlying need for ‘reporting’?

2. What is the minimum set of metadata required to achieve that goal?

3. What sources (systems) capture and manage these (meta)data? Is it possible to extract the data?

4. What makes a ‘standard’? What’s the benefit of a ‘standard’? How to get there?

5. How does the OA Switchboard make reporting ‘easy’? How does it work, end-to-end and real-time?

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and read also: Summary - Reporting Made Easy by the OA Switchboard