Projects

COARD conducts projects in collaboration with a wide range of organisations and groups, including large and small publishers, community groups and academic institutions.

Diversifying readership of open access books

With Springer Nature we conducted a large scale analysis of the usage and readership of open access scholarly books. We identified a strong signal of increased usage and more diverse geographical usage for these books compared to a stratified comparison sample of non-open access content. We also observed a geographical title effect with books seeing enhanced usage in regions and countries mentioned in the title.

UCL Press dashboard

Under the KU Research name, COARD has worked with UCL Press to provide usage dashboards for authors and internal analysis. Alongside the ongoing technical developments and updates we have published on the experience of these dashboards and how small university presses can make the most of the usage data that is available to them.

A data trust for OA book usage data

Along with the University of Michigan, Book Industry Study Group and the University of North Texas, the COARD team worked with collaborators from Queensland University of Technology to develop the concept of a data trust for open access book usage data. Publishers of open access books are diverse and many are quite small, making benchmarking, comparisons and rigorous analysis a challenge. This project developed and validated the idea of a Data Trust as a means for publishers and platforms to shared data in a trusted environment. This is now being taken forward as a A.W. Mellon Foundation funded project led by the University of North Texas.