Advancing to Launch by Developing IDS Governance Building Blocks

July 2022-June 2026

Sponsored by the Mellon Foundation

This project developed governance and technical infrastructures and documentation to support the aggregation of OA book usage data from across platforms and services through an International Data Space (IDS) for scholarly communcations. Project outputs paved the way for: 1) the transparent, trusted processing of open and privileged usage data, 2) streamlined usage data aggregation, and 3) ethical usage data benchmarking for scholarly communications.

Project Outputs

Specifically, this project focused on the narrow OA book usage data exchange use case to:

  1. develop guiding documentation and community-governance to coordinate the global infrastructure’s development and stakeholder engagement,

  2. facilitate community workshops and consultations to create a participant “rule book” that retains trust across participating infrastructure stakeholders,

  3. conduct an IDS Technical Gap Analysis to assess existing scholarly communications focused platforms and services capable of providing core functional IDS network services,

  4. develop a minimum viable open-source data space that applies the emerging ISO Dataspace Protocol to support individual organizations in managing their sensitive data access and use across organizational networks and individual organizations,

  5. document technical processes for scholarly communications dataspace participants and administrators,

  6. pilot the dataspace’s usage data connector service and participation agreements with six public and commercial OA book usage data providers and recipients, producing case studies and a report on the potential ROI for dataspace onboarding and participation, and

  7. facilitate community workshops to identify trusted revenue generation sources and develop supporter and membership models to inform a diversified sustainability model represented in a Business Model Canvas.

Due to conservative event expenditures and administrative staffing changes, project PIs secured Mellon Foundation approval to extend the project timeline a year beyond its original June 2025 end date while adding two work packages to the project.

Project outputs are openly shared. Please view our announcements, Zenodo and Github for more information.

Piloting the First Dataspace for Scholarly Communications

Mid 2025, the minimum viable dataspace for scholarly communications successfully supported data exchange among technical pilot partners. The resulting, state-of-the-art open source dataspace leveraged open source code, standards, and protocols managed by the Eclipse Foundation and the International Data Spaces Association.

Video recordings were produced to showcase the developed inter-organization OAEBUDT Usage Data Connector service MVP via the Scholarly Communications Trusted Dataspace.

These videos show off the first stable release of the organization-to-organization usage data connector, not the overall final "dataspace-as-a-service" (DSaaS) product and web interface which is planned for the next phase of development. The expectation is that the next release of the usage data connector via the dataspace will use web interfaces so that staff don't have to be experts in Postman, code or APIs.  

Project Team

Principal Investigators

  • Christina Drummond, University of North Texas

  • Yannick Legré, OPERAS

  • Prodromos Tsiavos (2023-2026); Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE (2022)

Project Staff

  • Ursula Rabar, OPERAS (thru August 2025)

Project Advisory Board Members

  • Brian O’Leary, Book Industry Study Group (BISG)

  • Charles Watkinson, University of Michigan Press

  • Jo Lambert, JISC Usage Statistics Portal and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS-UK) (thru January 2025)

  • Jon Elwell, EBSCO

  • Maria Zucker, De Gruyter (thru August 2023)

  • Niels Stern, OAPEN and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)

  • Peter Potter, TOME Project / De Gruyter

  • Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Project COUNTER (thru April 2024)

  • Vivian Berghahn, Berghahn Books

Consulting Contributors

Technical Pilot Partners

What’s Next

While the technical pilot focused on exchanging distributed scholarly publication usage data, sustainability planning during this project led the OAEBUDT Board of Trustees to approve broadening the scope of infrastructure development to support all types of scholarly communications operations that require managed data sharing. In October 2025 Trustees approved a new mission and vision for the continuation of the OAEBUDT work under the broader “Scholarly Communications Trusted Dataspace” brand. Fundraising is now underway to launch this dataspace’s with an operational reserve and funding for the next phase of technical development. Organizational networks interested in joining the next phase can contact one of our Trustees or Executive Director.

Research partnerships can explore how this emergent dataspace and trust network can streamline the organizational management of data connections to AI agents, knowledge graphs, analytics providers, and other services. Contact us to discuss how the dataspace can support your network’s data access so you can innovate more efficiently at scale.