This report outlines the work carried out within Work Package 2 (Building the Knowledge Base) of the PALOMERA project, which focused on creating the project’s Knowledge Base and populating it with various materials pertinent to open-access policies regarding academic books in the European Research Area. WP2 serves as the cornerstone for the project, providing the essential data and resources that drive subsequent analysis (Work Package 3), recommendations, and advocacy efforts (Work Package 4).

The data collection process was performed during the first 15 months of the project (WP2), drawing on extensive documentation, stakeholder surveys, and interviews. In addition, the designing and building of the Knowledge Base as a digital tool for various stakeholders will be described in detail. In this report as well as in the project, academic books are defined as scholarly, peer-reviewed, books including monographs, book chapters, edited collections, critical editions, and other long-form scholarly works. 

The methodology overview provides the outline of the research design and implementation, which employs both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The work was divided into four phases (see Figure 2). The first 6 months of the project (M1-M6) were dedicated to the development of the data collection methodology, and the second phase (M7-M10) to data collection. The third phase (M11-M13) was dedicated to validation, coding and Knowledge Base population, while the last phase (M14-M15) focused on implementing feedback and final reporting.

Chapters describe the detailed collection methodologies applied to different kinds of material: documents, interviews, bibliometric data, and surveys. The chapters are divided by data type rather than task number for easier reference. All methodological documents are gathered in the annexes to provide a better understanding of the process and to facilitate the reuse of this methodology in other research projects. The final chapter reflects on the creation and the data model behind the Knowledge Base.

The report provides three main conclusions:

1. The policy landscape in ERA is diverse and uneven, and the Knowledge Base aimed at reflecting this diversity of approaches rather than providing a comprehensive and exhaustive set of documents.

2. Various stakeholders have different perspectives and specific knowledge. We tried to capture the specificity of their vantage points through interviews and surveys. 

3. There is a lack of standardisation on all levels - documents, data, and policies - which makes the emergence of new initiatives more difficult as they lack good examples to base on or relevant data to support the policy creation. Knowledge Base aims to fill this gap. 

REVIEWERS: Vanessa Proudman, Luke Drury

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.