Opening up the Library: Transforming our Structures, Policies and Practices

Libraries have played an important role in facilitating the transition to open scholarship within their institutions: providing advocacy, advice and support for Funder Open Access policies, and developing research data management and open scholarship services.

However, much of this support has focussed on subscription publishing and the transition to OA journals. indeed, in a recent report to the Knowledge Exchange a survey respondent evidenced a concern that business models for OA monographs in particular were “predicated on those developed for journal articles“. Furthermore, the tipping point for journals regarding a transition to electronic has long since passed. Monographs are still predicated by print, the tipping point to ‘e’ is a long way off and may never happen. Therefore, open e-books are less well developed, and this is never truer than in the library supply chain. Open is not embedded into the culture, workflows and practices that are used as part of the book acquisition process.

As part of a landscape study on New University Presses and Scholar led publishing, Rupert Gatti (Open Book Publishers) explains that this is an issue for many open access book publishers and that it would be helpful to have a service that “looks at how to bring academic content into the catalogues and the digital learning environments of the universities and to allow universities to also relate back to the publisher, so that there is a flow of information going back both ways”.

One of the recommendations at a follow up workshop looking at OA monographs discovery in the library supply chain, was to look at the culture of libraries towards the acquisition of open content. The workshop suggested that less attention is paid to open book content as it is ‘free’ and so perceived as less valuable.

If we were to redesign our libraries around the premise of open rather than closed content, what would that look like? And how do we drive our own ‘transition’ of culture, processes and services so that they’re built around Open?

This paper will build on discussions held in 2019 within the UK research library community at both strategic (RLUK) and practitioner (NAG) levels, and enable delegates to take away strategic and practical ideas to effect change within their own libraries. For example, to:

• Redesign the Library supply chain to support open content
• Rethink how to demonstrate value for money for resources invested in open
• Support academic staff to select Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks for teaching
• Include open content in Library collection management and development policies so open content is selected and acquired in the same way as purchased or subscribed, or event that the discovery of open material is prioritised over purchased.

Finally, the paper will identify what kind of strategic approach is required as a sector at a European level, and what role there might be for sector organisations such as LIBER to support this.