OA Switchboard
The Metadata Exchange Hub: independent, not-for-profit, and community-led.
The OA Switchboard is a collaborative solution built to simplify the sharing of scholarly communications metadata among publishers, institutions, and funders. It is built by and for the people who use it, and leverages existing persistent identifiers such as DOI, ORCID, and ROR.
The OA Switchboard automatically routes structured publication metadata directly from participating publishers to connected institutions and funders via a single standardised protocol in near real time. Institutions receive consistent, authoritative data across all participating publishers.
Built on three principles:
- Trust: the independently managed, shared infrastructure provides a safe space for publication metadata; authoritative data from the publisher's source record, with no commercial interests in the chain
- Collaboration: the standardised protocol allows for the transparent exchange of data about (OA) publications, designed to operate and integrate with all stakeholder systems, including institutional repositories, CRIS platforms, and library management tools
- Efficiency: It eases the administrative burden of maintaining many-to-many relationships and reduces the manual volume of information exchange
Benefits
- Trusted, standardised data: a consistent format of structured metadata from multiple publishers in one place
- Know when your researchers publish and act on it: event-driven notifications arrive at the point of publication, giving library and research support teams the timely trigger they need for author outreach, OA compliance checks, and licence recording
- Less manual work, more efficiency: publication data delivered directly to your repository, CRIS, or library system reducing curation workload and the time spent chasing or collecting metadata after the fact
- Because it's the right thing to do: community-first, not-for-profit, and independently managed. Free to Jisc member institutions through to the end of 2029
Why is Jisc involved?
We are working with the OA Switchboard to explore how UK institutions can best benefit from the service’s shared data and infrastructure. An agreement has been reached to allow higher education institutions that are Jisc members to use the Switchboard for free through to the end of 2029.