The OA Switchboard has developed quickly over the last couple of years and is starting to demonstrate the real value it can provide to our community, and we are excited to announce that Hindawi has now also successfully integrated with the OA Switchboard. Going forward, this will enable the OA Switchboard to send out notifications on our behalf to institutions/consortia and funders when a relevant article is published.
As an independent intermediary, OA Switchboard aims to simplify and streamline publication communications between research funders, institutions/consortia, and publishers by providing shared infrastructure, standards and back-office services that facilitate efficient tracking of publication-level metadata.
In 2018 a group of stakeholders, led by Hindawi’s former CEO Paul Peters, met in London to discuss potential challenges that could hinder the implementation of funder policies supporting open access publication – from these discussions, the OA Switchboard was born. The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) oversaw the process of bringing together key stakeholders across the industry, leading the project phase and launch as a stand-alone organization, and now ongoing support through a strategic partnership with OA Switchboard.
Built on the premise that complexity is likely to result in a lack of transparency and efficiency, the aim of the Switchboard would be to tackle this head on in regard to the communications around open access publications.
Anticipating central funding of open access publications to grow in scale in the coming years, on top of the emergence of diverse open access business models that added further confusion when tracking committed funds, OA Switchboard foresaw the need to establish more efficient routes of communication and put forward a more effective approach to sharing article metadata between relevant stakeholders.
With the integration of this shared infrastructure into our workflows, we are able to achieve even greater automation and scalability for our own journals, as well as our publishing partners. Once an article is published, all stakeholders will be automatically alerted of this – making it very easy to track publications of funded research. An in-built custom connector will generate a set of metadata in a standard messaging protocol that gets automatically sent to institutions and funders alerting them that a new article has been published, along with the relevant metadata (although excluding any personal details, such as authors’ email addresses).
Hindawi will automatically store messages that can’t be sent due to the recipient not yet being part of OA Switchboard and are actively looking at ways to encourage more participants to sign up so they can receive them easily and efficiently have access to information related to their publications.
Having the capacity to share trackable article metadata with funders, institutions, and authors as soon as articles have been published enhances openness in research by instilling more confidence, and driving greater transparency, in the processes of open access publishing.
After all, science does work best when research is open throughout and after the publication journey has been completed.
This blog post is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). Illustration by David Jury.