Building an interactive dashboard to visualize institutional open access publishing trends

Abstract

As part of an effort to seek sustainable support models for Open Access (OA) publishing, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), Health Sciences and Human Services Library’s (HSHSL’s) Scholarly Communications Committee developed an interactive dashboard to visualize university-wide OA publishing trends. Using publication data exported from Scopus and visualized in Microsoft Power BI, the dashboard displays five years of publishing trends by OA model, publisher, journal, school, and citation count. The dashboard is fully interactive, allowing users to filter results based on school, OA model, and year. 

The design of the dashboard was iterative, with planning discussions taking place in Summer 2024, data model development and initial data collection in Fall 2024, refining of the visualization and data model in early Spring 2025, and the publication of the final dashboard to our website in April 2025. The dashboard continues to be refined and improved based on feedback from stakeholders, and the project team plans to incorporate data on publishing costs in Spring 2026. 

The project was designed for sustainability and adaptability, with a documented workflow that will be easy for future committees to implement. This innovative, replicable approach supports informed decision-making around OA publishing and provides a model that can be adopted by other academic health sciences libraries.