How Open Investing Will Transform Library Collections

Academic library collections and the underlying spending streams that define their contours are in the midst of a seismic shift. Over the last few years, libraries have begun to embrace a new array of open investments, including open access books and journals and open infrastructure. This represents a remarkable break from the traditional approach to the development of library collections, in which funds were primarily spent on print or subscriptions to paywalled content, creating walled gardens that benefitted the privileged few. The values-aligned open investments that libraries make today are helping to build an open scholarly ecosystem, accessible to users around the globe, that is increasing information equity as well as the impact of science.

Library open investing, we believe, represents a fundamental transformation in the way library collections are conceived, considered, and built. This transformation owes much to changes in funder requirements and evolving expectations around openness. But it also arises from the library community’s own efforts to understand and adapt to a new information ecosystem defined by digital content and the promise of open access.

Over the past 15 years, many attempts have been made to reframe and re-envision library collections. Led by Lorcan Dempsey at OCLC, librarians in the United States put forward ideas like the Collections as a Service (Linden et al., 2018) and the Inside out Library (Dempsey et al., 2014). Together these ideas elevated the importance of special collections over general collections and network approaches over local approaches. Collections-focused collaborations were rightly promoted and their successes celebrated.

In Germany, around the same time, Ralf Schimmer and his colleagues at the Max Planck Digital Library made the influential argument that there is enough money in the system to flip the entire paywalled journal market to open (Schimmer et al., 2015). This argument helped accelerate national open access agreements and led to the launch of OA2020, an international initiative that encourages libraries to shift their spending from paywalled subscriptions to open access.

Critically, however, missing from much of the collections-related writing and initiatives in the 2010s was explicit mention or framing around equity and inclusivity. This is somewhat surprising since equitable and inclusive access to information is one of the American Library Association’s eight key action areas and a core value of the Association of European Research Libraries. In the United States, the murder of George Floyd in 2020 accelerated efforts to center equity in library collections discussions and decisions. Today, equity and inclusivity are regularly featured in the values frameworks commonly associated with open investing. Equity is also the focus of recent efforts by international organizations like OA2020 and the Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association.

During the same period, the business models and strategies of scholarly publishers have shifted in equally dramatic ways. Entirely new funding approaches, like Subscribe to Open and Opening the Future have emerged, helping to flip to open access not only journals, but a rapidly growing number of scholarly monographs as well. Meanwhile, library investment options for open infrastructure and alternative approaches to scholarly communication—like publication platforms, or open peer review and discovery services—are continuing to grow.

Today, collections librarians and their scholarly communication and open strategy colleagues are in the fortunate position of encountering an ever-expanding bonanza of open investment opportunities. In this article, we will explore the values that guide open investment decisions, budget strategies for open investing, and some open investment options.

Academic Values and the Library

A significant portion of the investments made by universities in scholarly resources for research and teaching are channeled through academic libraries, which play a central role in scholarly communication, not only through the collections they build, but also by financing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure (such as discovery systems or solutions for long term preservation). Open science and the growing preoccupation with the digital sovereignty of research institutions—that is, the ability of an institution to control its own digital destiny by controlling the data, hardware, and software that it relies on and creates—have led various stakeholders, from governments, to boards, to individual academics, to call for assessment of how these investments align with academic values. In recent years, multiple frameworks have been developed to analyze these investments, including the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication and the Library Partnership Rating. These frameworks all identify inclusivity and equity as central values that should be considered in investment decisions.

To conduct this kind of assessment, libraries often turn to third-party advisers like the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP—Diamond OA journals), the Open Book Collective (OBC—Diamond OA books), or the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS—open infrastructure). This advisory function for open investments might be a relatively new development, but is typically offered through established networks and consortia: OACIP is organized by LYRASIS (a consortium based in the U.S.); the portfolio of OBC is now also offered through Jisc (a membership community for higher education active in the U.K.).

Finding the Budget

The question remains: where should libraries find the budget to make open investments that are attentive to equity and inclusivity, whether selected independently or as advised by OACIP, OBC, and the like?

If we accept the premise that academic libraries exist to enable scholarly communication, then it is obvious that the funds these libraries currently allocate to paywalled publications can and should be repurposed to support open publishing (in line with the aforementioned argument of Schimmer et al.).

But covering the costs of open publishing through the author-pays approach—whether through article processing charges (APCs), book processing charges (BPCs), or read-and-publish deals—introduces new inequities. By enabling open publishing through such deals, libraries make publications accessible to all readers. But they do so at the expense of openness on the other side of the equation—that is, the side of the authors. Since, by investing this way, the library only pays to realize open access for the work of authors from their own host institution, they limit participation in scholarly communication to a restricted group of affiliates, just as they do when they police access to paywalled electronic resources. As such, libraries reinforce existing privilege by creating a situation in which affiliated authors enjoy the benefits of open publishing at the exclusion of non-affiliated authors (Brunsting et al., 2023).

What is more, if the author-pays approach to open publishing becomes standard, consuming the library budget to the extent that there is no money left to support alternatives (Pooley, 2021)—such as OA publishers whose business models do not require author payments, or innovations in scholarly communication that go beyond journals and books—then libraries will become even more deeply complicit in working against equitable, diverse, and innovative approaches to open publishing.

Luckily, libraries that are aware of this risk can take several approaches to mitigate it.

A first possibility is to take a radical approach: cancel contracts following an author-pays logic and move the money that is saved to providers or infrastructures that are better aligned with academic values. For example, at the Université de Lorraine, money saved by canceling a deal with Wiley worth €218,000 has been reinvested in other ventures that better accord with the open science agenda of the university.

A second possibility—the negative approach—focuses less on deciding what a library wants to invest in, and more on what the library does not want to invest in. In this context, contracts with providers could not only establish what service is being provided, but also restrict how the service is provided. For example, a contract could define expectations and responsibilities concerning privacy (which is threatened in the case of surveillance publishing—see, e.g., Pooley, 2022, Lamdan, 2023 and the Licensing Privacy Project), basic human rights (which are infringed in the supply chains of some commercial academic publishers that outsource to low-wage countries—see Verbrugge, 2021), the rights of authors in the context of training generative artificial intelligence (e.g., Eaton 2024), or publishing integrity (which has come to the fore in the context of the papermill crisis, see Brundy-Thornton, 2024). Suppliers could face financial penalties, or a “three strikes and you’re out” rule: after a first transgression, the supplier would receive a warning; after a second, the library would stop payment for a year without a loss of access or service; and after a third, the contract would be terminated. This negative approach would likely free up some of the library’s collection budget, which could be reallocated to open investments.

A third possibility is to decide not to set any hard rules about what libraries can or cannot invest in, but to prioritize truly open publishing. We could call this the strategic approach. All too often, libraries only invest in building and sustaining an open ecosystem if they have some money left over after purchasing books and journals published behind a paywall, or after financing the mainstream author-pays approach to open publishing. But what if we reverse that order? Why not prioritize spending on providers of services within scholarly communication who recognize that authors should control their work and who truly serve scholars and scholarship? And only when there is money left over move to spending on providers who prioritize profit over service to the research community?

A fourth and final suggestion is to adopt a protective approach by setting aside part of the library’s budget to be spent exclusively on initiatives that are innovative and equitable. In essence, rather than identifying priorities for the budget as a whole, libraries could allocate a portion of the budget to be spent exclusively on open investments. Examples of this protective approach are the well-known 2.5 percent commitment suggested by David Lewis in 2017 (Lewis, 2017) and the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access, which was founded in 2018 (Verbeke-Mesotten, 2022).

Library Open Investments

How do libraries spend funds that were traditionally invested in print collections or paywalled publications when they are freed up using, for instance, the radical or protective approach?

To a certain extent, this budget is still used to build collections, but in a way that disrupts traditional collection development, since the support is directed to publications available in open access and focused beyond the home institution (see also Reinsfelder-Pike, 2018).

A prime example is investing in what has become known as the diamond open access model, which enables authors to publish in OA without incurring costs. A 2021 study by Bosman et al. showed that journals working within a diamond OA framework are actually more common than was generally assumed in the Global North, although the sector is imbalanced in terms of discipline (e.g., a lot more present in HSS than in STEM) and region (e.g., a lot more present in Europe than in the US and Canada) (Bosman et al., 2021). Academic libraries play a pivotal role for diamond OA journals by collectively funding individual titles—for instance through the aforementioned Open Access Community Investment Program—or the infrastructure or publisher behind a portfolio of journals, such as Érudit, OpenEdition Journals, or the Open Library of Humanities.

The diamond OA model is not limited to journals. Numerous peer-reviewed monographs, edited collections, and textbooks are also being published in open access without author-facing costs, thanks to library support of, for instance, the Open Book Collective of presses and programs such as Fund to Mission of the University of Michigan Press and MIT Press’s Direct to Open.

Academic libraries also invest in the infrastructure essential for the discoverability of open access books and journals, like the Directory of Open Access Journals and the Directory of Open Access Books. Similarly, they financially support innovative solutions for scholarly communication that go beyond books and journals: preprint servers that allow the dissemination of articles quickly, openly and globally, like the coalition built by the Open Science Framework; publication platforms that open up the entire research process rather than just the published results, like ResearchEquals; or the publication of citation data which is truly open by being findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable, as realized by OpenCitations.

Conclusion

With open investing, librarians are bringing collection spending into alignment with the values of their profession and the values of their institutions. And they are helping to build an accessible and equitable open knowledge system that spans the globe. If collections thinking in the 2010s moved libraries from the local to the network, then open investing is moving collections thinking in the 2020s from the level of the network to that of an open ecosystem. Library investments in open access allow research articles to be freely read around the world, while avoiding the author-pays approach ensures equity and inclusivity. Investments in open infrastructure ensure the platforms and tools of open science are accessible to all. And investments in open metadata improve discoverability and interoperability. We are currently lacking the data to pinpoint how mainstream this redirection of the library’s spending has become—the Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure project promises to shed light on this to at least some extent—but the growing number of open investment opportunities, as well as their institutionalization, illustrated by them becoming part of consortial offers, clearly indicate the direction of travel.

Having made it through the COVID 19 pandemic, society unfortunately finds itself confronting a swelling roster of global threats—extreme weather, loss of biodiversity, political extremism. Library open investing on its own, of course, will do little to address the climate crisis or the next public health emergency. But library open investing strengthens the infrastructure and practices of open science and in so doing is helping to accelerate the creation of knowledge. Librarians who are ready to move beyond the paywalled past towards a more equitable knowledge ecosystem now have an alternative. With open investing, libraries can shape this open future together.

References

Bosman, J., Frantsvåg, J. E., Kramer, B., Langlais, P.-C., & Proudman, V. (2021). OA Diamond Journals Study. Part 1: Findings. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4558704

Brundy, C., & Thornton, J. B. (2024). The paper mill crisis is a five-alarm fire for science: what can librarians do about it? Insights: The UKSG Journal, 37(1), 11. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.659

Brunsting K., Harrington, C., & Scott, R. E. (2023). Open Access Literature in Libraries. Principles and Practices. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/fpml/163.

Dempsey, L., Malpas, C., & Lavoie, B. (2014). Collection Directions: The Evolution of Library Collections and Collecting. Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 14(3), 393–423. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2014.0013

Eaton, L. (2024). Academic Fracking: When Publishers Sell Scholars Work to AI. AI + Education = Simplified. https://aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/academic-fracking-when-publishers.

Lamdan, S. (2023). Data Cartels. The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information. Stanford UP.

Lewis, D. W. (2017). The 2,5% Commitment. https://doi.org/10.7912/C2JD29.

Linden, J., Tudesco, S., & Dollar, D. (2018). Collections as a service: A research library’s perspective. College & Research Libraries, 79(1), 86-99. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.1.86

Pooley, J. (2021). Collective Funding to Reclaim Scholarly Publishing. Commonplace, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.250139da

Pooley, J. (2022). Surveillance Publishing. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.1874

Reinsfelder, T. L., & Pike, C. A. (2018). Using Library Funds to Support Open Access Publishing through Crowdfunding: Going Beyond Article Processing Charges. Collection Management, 43(2), 138–149. https://doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2017.1415826

Schimmer, R., Geschuhn, K. K., & Vogler, A. (2015). Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access. https://doi.org/10.17617/1.3

Verbeke, D., & Mesotten, L. (2022). Library funding for open access at KU Leuven. Insights: The UKSG Journal, 35(1). https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.565

Verbrugge, B. (2021). 'Your article is in production’: So what? Proceedings KU Leuven Open Science Day 2021. https://doi.org/10.21428/1192f2f8.2f9a4d50