For most Agreements, Consortia and Institutions agree on a dedicated balance to cover the expected Agreement publication activity. Such account balances are called Deposit Accounts in Oable, which enable users to monitor and pay the Request fees against these Deposit Accounts across publishers. The Deposit Account overview page can be found here.

Broadly speaking, there are currently three types of Deposit Accounts:

Depending on the publisher, Deposit Accounts may be manually managed by Consortia and/or Institutions and mirrored in Oable while other Deposit Account balances may be directly integrated with the publisher. For most publishers, the balances today are managed manually and thus mirrored.

For example, when a user has a Deposit Account with a non-integrated publisher, the balance of this account is manually mirrored on Oable. Whenever a Request is approved and paid on Oable, the fee of the Request is deducted from the Deposit Account balance in the same way as it's done on the publisher side. Similarly, whenever a top-up is done with the publisher, this also has to be done on Oable to keep the deposits in sync.

For integrated publishers, the Deposit Balances will be synchronized in near real-time and therefore no manual intervention is needed.

Note: To support the mirroring process, the Oable customer onboarding team is meeting on a regular basis with clients to monitor and sync up the cross-publisher balances and make any changes required.