Open Investment Evolutions at KU Leuven Libraries

In the past, support for open research, and particularly open access, at KU Leuven was largely limited to facilitating open archiving in the institutional repository Lirias. Wanting to do more, KU Leuven Libraries established a Fund for Fair Open Access in 2018. Its aim was to stimulate the non-profit approach to open publishing by providing financial support for OA books published by Leuven University Press as well as OA journal articles, on the condition that these were produced by publishers adhering to the Fair OA principles. Over time, support for APCs of any kind was discontinued and was replaced by more and more investments in open infrastructure for scholarly communication, going beyond journals and books. What is more, open investments at KU Leuven Libraries outgrew the Fair OA Fund and are increasingly realized by repurposing discipline-specific collection budget. This poster not only presents the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA, but also the bigger picture of library support for open research at KU Leuven during the last decade and the continuing efforts to leverage the library’s budget to stimulate non-profit and community-owned approaches to open research.