Book Analytics Service

How can the Book Analytics Dashboard help me?

Whether you’re a publisher, librarian, funder, administrator, or other stakeholder in the scholarly communications community, the Dashboard can help you gain a fuller view of book usage data.

Books are made available through a multitude of different platforms, and each has its own way of providing usage statistics. Using our Dashboard gives you a single point of synthesis of usage data from a wide range of sources, allowing you a consolidated view of usage.

We take care to bring together a synthesis of usage data of known provenance to allow you to compare data across your chosen time span. Learn more about how we collect and process book usage data.

Who’s behind the Dashboard and how is it operated?

The Dashboard was initially developed as a pilot project 2020-2022, which developed a prototype for gathering book usage information from multiple data sources, and combining and presenting it in interactive visualisation dashboards for publisher partners.

Funded again by the Mellon Foundation, the pilot project was scaled up to become the Book Analytics Dashboard project (2022-2025), focused on creating a sustainable OA book focused analytics service.

The fully-functional Dashboard is now operated by OAPEN, a trusted infrastructure for OA books. OAPEN is a not-for-profit organisation which cannot be sold, and has committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) with a public self-audit of their practices across the themes of governance, sustainability, and insurance. OAPEN was chosen as the host organisation by the Book Analytics Dashboard (BAD) project Advisory Board, following a series of focus groups with publishers which endorsed OAPEN as an organisation which could be trusted by the community to run the Dashboard in an open and consultative way.

What’s the difference between BAD and BAS?

BAD refers to the Book Analytics Dashboard project (2022-2025), whereas BAS means the Book Analytics Service. BAD is the project to launch BAS from a functional pilot Dashboard to a self-sustaining service with appropriate governance and cost-recovery financing. As well as being key elements of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), these are also essential in ensuring that the future of BAS does not depend on grant funding.