A $1.2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will promote Open Access through a new data trust for scholarly publishing.

The University of North Texas (UNT), in partnership with four other institutions, has received a $1.2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a new international data trust that will improve the measurement and analysis of Open Access (OA) books.

OA materials are free to read online and are distributed without licensing restrictions. Allowing unrestricted access to scholarly research enables students, professors and scholars to utilize the most up-to-date and relevant information for their work.

“Increasing access to research is of vital importance to UNT,” said Diane Bruxvoort, dean of the UNT Libraries. “The university has long been a leader in promoting Open Access.”

UNT has hosted an annual Open Access Symposium since 2010 and was the first public institution in the state of Texas to adopt a policy in support of Open Access.

The new data trust will be the first of its kind for scholarly publishing, and will put into action the recommendations from a paper published by BISG that highlights current challenges in getting institutions to share data.

The two-year project, led by UNT librarian Kevin Hawkins and conducted in partnership with the Educopia Institute, Curtin University, University of Michigan and the Book Industry Study Group, is designed to facilitate academic data sharing by compiling ebook usage data and standardizing analysis and reporting tools.   

“Open access to scholarly literature has developed more slowly for academic books than for journals,” said Hawkins, who serves as assistant dean for scholarly communication at the UNT Libraries. “The data trust will be designed to ensure responsible use of ebook metrics and will be a vital source of insight into the ways specialist scholarly books are being accessed and used, and the impact of the knowledge they contain.”

The project will begin in January 2020. Further information can be found at https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1596980/.