Workshop: Assessing, Financing and Maintaining Open Access Infrastructures – a New Role for Libraries

The LIBER Working Group on Open Access organised an interactive workshop where participants were offered the opportunity to gain insights in the field of open infrastructures and how the ecosystem for such initiatives work. During the workshop leading examples were showcased and participants were able to discuss and assess opportunities within their specific setting.

As part of the ongoing open access transformation in Europe, open and community owned  infrastructures have become more important (e.g., SPARC Europe Report on “Open Science Infrastructures”, the Coalition-S-commissioned Diamond-OA-Study or the SCOSS approach of collaborative financing). Open Access related infrastructures can range from publication platforms (e.g. Openjournals.nl or Journal.fi), disciplinary repositories and preprint servers (e.g. Zenodo and arXiv) and search services (e.g. BASE, Sherpa/ROMEO) to Monitoring tools (German Open Access monitor or the ESAC initiative) and impact analysis services (e.g. Open Citations). An increasing amount  of these infrastructures are maintained and/or financed by research libraries. Libraries could play a prominent role for the sustainability of these services. It is, furthermore, important to understand how the services are governed in relation to the needs of the user community.