Open Access (OA) output is growing year-on-year and increasingly, funders and institutions are paying for OA centrally. OA business models are becoming ever more diverse, some with or without individual publication fees, some through agreements with publishers. Meanwhile, funders and institutions are expanding their requirements about how various research outputs should be published.
With all of these developments, it has become complicated to find out how to get the service charges for certain OA publications settled, to enable such financial settlement, and to monitor funds and track spending in real time.
It has also become complicated to find out if and how specific OA publications meet publishing requirements given multi-lateral arrangements (with possibly multiple authors involved, each with multiple institutional affiliations and funder arrangements), while dealing with many stakeholders and relationships, and a myriad of systems and processes.
This complexity necessitated the initiation of the OA Switchboard project that is now in the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and Pilot stage.
The development work on the OA Switchboard MVP commenced at the beginning of May, following the announcement of ELITEX as the third party software development provider. The MVP development process kicked off on May 18, 2020 with the pilot users (a selection of funders, institutions and publishers), some of whom were joined by their partners (manuscript systems and payment solution providers). The Pilot phase is scheduled to start at the end of June.
The MVP development is broken down into six iterations spanning 13 weeks. The first two are well underway and concern the technical design, data model, the core message hub and the message datastore. The first demos are scheduled following the third iteration. The role of the pilot participants in the development phase is to help shape and test the MVP (e.g. test screens, provide test data), help establish standardisation for communication (metadata in ‘messages’) and reporting, and ultimately to help conclude if the MVP technically delivers.
The OA Switchboard is an intermediary, aimed at solving this ‘many-to-many-to-many’ challenge, and the MVP is the first step. There are more use cases for institutions, funders and publishers (and their partners) which will be explored later in the process.
Invitations for the first demos of the OA Switchboard will be announced via a mailing list and Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
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