As interest in publishing open access (OA) reaches unprecedented levels, the sustainability of supporting OA publishing continues to challenge institutions. Transformative Agreements (TAs) have recently emerged as a potential solution, shifting the burden of Article Processing Charges (APCs) from authors to institutions by bundling publishing with subscription costs.
Ari Romero, Jeremy Berg, Mayakah Joseph, "Accessing Open Access – Discoverability Difficulties"
Since the advent of Open Access (OA) publishing as a response to the serials crisis in scholarly communications, academic librarians have often served as OA guides for faculty as they navigate the research process. However, as more studies have emerged on faculty perceptions of gold OA, the roles of librarians in promoting OA have come into question. In June 2024, I published a literature review article that aims to examine articles and book chapters published from 2010 to 2023 with a geographic focus on North America that discuss how and why librarians have promoted gold OA to faculty.
Resource sharing has a role to play in the discovery and access of open access content. Resource sharing is not just about interlibrary loan but rather point-of-need procurement for patrons, and open access materials are an important part of the resource sharing toolkit for fulfillment. Furthermore, there is an opportunity to promote open access items to patrons through routine communications, daily request processing workflows, software enhancements and ILL webpages, and resource sharing outreach.
This talk summarizes three research projects funded by the National Science Foundation and Mellon Foundation that together aim to facilitate the exchange of scholarship impact indicators and usage metrics in a world of distributed, syndicated open publications.
Since fall 2022, the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries has offered the Open Initiatives Grant which provides funding to expand our support for both open teaching & learning projects, as well as open access publishing. A panel of the Open Initiatives Grant Committee members will share the committee organization, application processes, as well as successes and failures as we navigated piloting, marketing the grant opportunity to our faculty, and advocating for continued funding support.
Colleen Lyon is the Head of Scholarly Communications at the University of Texas at Austin. In this role she supports the institutional repository, Texas ScholarWorks, open access publishing, copyright and author rights. She is broadly interested in how to improve the scholarly communication system to make it more equitable for authors and readers.
