Blog post - OA Switchboard reaches milestone
17 March 2022 by Yvonne Campfens, Executive Director OA Switchboard
The OA Switchboard reached an impressive milestone at the start of this month: 100,000 exchanges of OA article metadata from publishers to research funders, institutions, and consortia.
Why is this important? By reaching this milestone, OA Switchboard proves that it performs as it was designed to, and that it reduces OA workflow complexity for all parties involved. Moreover, it has developed quickly. Hindawi’s recent integration with OA Switchboard is further testimony to this fact.
“The OA Switchboard is starting to demonstrate the real value it can provide to our community” according to this week’s blog post where Hindawi, as one of our founding partners, announces that they are now reporting their publication metadata via OA Switchboard.
Gaynor Redvers-Mutton from one of our earliest adopters Microbiology Society, said:
"The more who use it, the better a resource it becomes; we want to stop crafting our own reports for our Publish and Read customers and have everyone use a self-serve, standard and secure messaging service" and it is clear this is becoming a reality.
Fully OA and mixed model publishers of all sizes are now integrated with the OA Switchboard, and others are soon to follow, including the first diamond OA initiatives. There is now a critical mass of research reporting to funders and institutions via a standardised messaging protocol designed with and for the people who will use it. For more information and statistics, please check our Participants page.
The OA Switchboard creates a safe space for sharing data. As an independent message hub, we’re committed to using stakeholders’ data for no other purpose than delivering metadata as per their instructions. As a trusted and neutral intermediary, OA Switchboard connects parties and systems, streamlining communication and the exchange of OA-related publication-level information. It ensures OA policies and agreements are facilitated and that a financial settlement can be reached, while simultaneously enabling progress in developing OA business models.
Those hooked up to the OA Switchboard recognise the value it brings to the complicated OA landscape. The OA Switchboard is an intermediary that brings transparency and simplicity, reducing the administrative burden on its participants while letting shared infrastructure and standards drive efficiency and cost reduction in a data-secure environment.
Now that the OA Switchboard is well into its second year, we are eager to share what we have learned about OA reporting and how to make it easier.
We invite you to join us for our next webinar on Tuesday 29 March: “Lessons Learned: to Make Reporting Easy: source data, PIDs, interoperability and a simple messaging tool”, to hear more about how the OA Switchboard community is informing best practice and for an evidence-based look at how different stakeholders deal with reporting on OA-related publication level information via a series of talks and use case presentations.
Join us live to learn from and contribute to this highly practical webinar. Register for free >>
