Understanding and measuring the impact of Open Science on French academic libraries

In the history of academic libraries, Open Science can still be considered as a recent phenomenon. Academic libraries are still in the process of building skilled teams and developing services and partnerships. They need to move fast in a changing environment and at the same time, they need to gain a better understanding of changes at work. Therefore, the role of a national association is to help open science stakeholders to analyse how academic libraries adapt to this new way of doing research and how in return open science transforms organisations.

The French association for academic library directors and managers (ADBU) has launched several initiatives on the impact of open science for academic libraries. Its 2022 annual conference gathered specialists in organisational sociology and open science stakeholders to debate about the effects of open science upon research structures and libraries.

Since 2019, the association renews every two years a survey upon research support in academic libraries. The questions relate to the organisation of services, to human and financial resources, to partnerships and to the impact of open science policies. In 2023, ADBU was able to collect data from 70 libraries.The association can now use these data to make comparisons, identify trends and have a clear vision on human resources. The 2023 survey describes several library profiles depending on the size of the research structure.

The need for this survey was all the more important as there is a lack of activity indicators at both local and national level. French open science policy includes a major effort on indicators of the openness of science. The open science monitor allows research structures to measure the increase of open research. However, this tool is only about performances and results : it does not collect data about human and financial resources or training and data processing activities. This information is not included either in the data on academic libraries collected every year by the Ministry of higher education and research. The contribution of libraries to open science is invisible in all kinds of reports and key figures. It is impossible to analyse the concrete commitment of libraries and to compare the evolution of resources and activities at local, national and European levels. This is why ADBU is now carrying a study on open science activities indicators. This study aims to define relevant, usable and scalable indicators : it takes into account the specific features of the support services for open science and the diversity of situations in research structures.

Based upon these initiatives, ADBU becomes increasingly able to describe how open science is changing academic libraries and the way they interact with their environment. The presentation will focus on major trends, especially in the fields of team building and collaborations. It will show how the specific features of open science services induce new ways of working together inside and outside the library. It will also emphasise emerging gaps between libraries depending on their size and resources and the specific impact of open science policies.