How Four Smaller Institutions Are Investing in Open Access

Much of the conversation about how libraries should support open access (OA) publishing takes place within the context of large academic research libraries—institutions where there is significant faculty research and publishing. As leaders in four liberal arts college libraries, we believe that even within the constraints of more limited budgets, smaller institutions can make meaningful open access investments, and we advocate for smaller colleges being a part of the dialogue about how to make open access publishing sustainable. At the invitation of Lyrasis, the four of us spoke about this topic during a webinar in May 2025; we’ll continue the conversation at a session at the upcoming Charleston Conference in November.

Our four institutions—Davidson College, Dickinson College, Hollins University, and Swarthmore College—vary in size from 800–2,400 students and are all members of the Oberlin Group, a consortium of libraries at private four-year liberal arts colleges in the United States. Undergraduate teaching is central to the mission of liberal arts colleges, but each of our institutions also views faculty research and publication as an important complement to teaching excellence. As liberal arts college libraries, we share values including a belief in intellectual freedom and exploration; the unfettered expression of ideas; interdisciplinarity; equity of access; and a commitment to lifelong learning, research, and service.

Why Open Access Matters on Our Campuses

Aside from the clear alignment of institutional values to open access principles, OA investment provides tangible benefits for our faculty, students and libraries. Open access to our scholars’ work enhances its visibility and global reach. Removal of paywalls reduces friction for our students in their research or classroom use and, for institutions that are frequently unable to extend paywall access to our alumni, increases equity of access to resources for students after graduation. At the institution level, liberal arts colleges believe in the power of the collective. This is both aspirational and pragmatic: by contributing to the open scholarly ecosystem—of which we are a small but meaningful part—we both expand the universe of publications an individual library can provide to its users as well as benefit from reduced subscription, management, and interlibrary loan costs.

Experimenting Our Way Forward

At each of our institutions, we’ve experimented with different methods of OA support in search of sustainable, scalable models. Some of the ways we’ve supported OA include: participating in consortial OA agreements; supporting “memberships” (e.g., Public Library of Science (PLOS), Open Library of Humanities, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), HathiTrust, Open Education Network, Lever Press); continuing Subscribe to Open (S2O) payments for journals aligned with our respective curricula; maintaining institutional repositories; and supporting primary source OA digitization initiatives. We’ve seen significant institutional effects from our OA support:

• At Dickinson College: Since 2015, the librarian has served on the College’s Research and Development Committee, reviewing applications and attending meetings. Upon faculty request, OA article processing charges (APCs) with fees that meet criteria are paid for by the library. What began as an APC funding arrangement has led to additional benefits including deepened library awareness of faculty research interests, library inclusion in conversations about faculty scholarship and publication, opportunities to educate faculty about OA, and increased recognition of librarians’ expertise.
• At Davidson College: We have taken seriously our institutional mission to develop “humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and service” by ensuring knowledge created at the institution serves the broader public good. Our investment in OA prioritizes departments that support faculty/student research and publishing: almost 50 percent of faculty/student articles published in the past five years have been open access, a percentage that is steadily increasing.
• At Swarthmore College: We’ve benefited from read-and-publish deals negotiated by the Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration & Innovation (PALCI) consortium, and our scholarly communication librarian keeps faculty informed about which publishers are included in our agreements. The scholarly communication librarian also prepares an annual report showing the impact of open access publishing by our faculty.
• At Hollins University: To “create a just future,” as our mission statement bids us to do, we must hear all voices. Open access publishing provides a crucial venue for otherwise marginalized voices. As one of our students wrote in a descriptive essay about her award-winning history research paper built around sources in Reveal Digital’s Independent Voices project, an open access collection of alternative periodicals: “The most important lesson I carried away from this assignment was to think creatively about the different types of sources there are for underrepresented voices; the history that can and must be written from them provides an essential broadening of the history of American society.”

The Hurdles We Face

While our libraries collectively participate in a wide array of OA models, our budgets are stagnant or declining. We have read-and-publish agreements with some publishers, but these can be hard for us to afford, especially when they require an expensive “big deal”-type package that we cannot tailor for our more limited curriculum. Consortial participation with a small-library funding tier helps, but these deals can still swallow up a big percentage of our budgets.

Direct payment of individual faculty OA charges can also be difficult depending on the per-article fee, which the large for-profit publishers continue to raise. Subscribe to Open (S2O) relies on the continuation of a sufficient number of paying subscribers, which some libraries may have difficulty sustaining long-term.

Effective Strategies for Advancing Open Access

Despite the challenges, we believe the good to be gained by liberal arts college libraries supporting open access outweighs the concerns. Some advice to consider:

• Embed open access support in your collection development policies and procedures (as Hollins has done), your strategic plan, and your mission statement.
• Participate in the conversation. Do not leave the discussions to the large schools. We have a role to play in identifying and supporting sustainable funding models that leverage contributions from a wide range of institutions.
• Provide educational support about open access to your community; serve as the experts by providing guides (such as those at Davidson and Dickinson). OA support can bring the library into meaningful conversations with faculty about their publication choices.
• Dedicate even a small amount of your budget to open access. Fees for OA initiatives and memberships are often “tiered” to make participation by smaller institutions more affordable, and the collective impact of our support can be significant, even if our individual contributions are not high. Start with offers through consortia to which your library already belongs.
• Look for support opportunities that reflect your institution’s curriculum, align with institutional goals, and support the work of your own faculty. These have the most direct impact on your institution and may be the easiest to make a case for.
• Find institutional partners and OA champions outside of the library. Broad campus support can demonstrate that OA is a shared institutional value, not just a library priority.

Participation as a Force for Change

Our institutions’ budgets are strained at the moment, like those of many of our peers, yet we continue to prioritize our open access investments whenever possible. In the long run, open access benefits libraries and our institutions by reducing our future costs and moving us toward more sustainable budget models. It benefits our students by bringing more quality information to their fingertips. It benefits our faculty by making their work more accessible and impactful. And in a time when misinformation is rampant, liberal arts institutions, their libraries, and their mutual commitment to open knowledge for all of society are more important than ever. By leading with our values, smaller institutions can amplify our collective impact and demonstrate that every institution, regardless of size, has a vital role to play in building a more just and open system of knowledge.

References

Davidson College Library. (2025, July 31). Open access. Davidson College. https://davidson.libguides.com/oa

Dickinson College. (2025, September 9). Open access publishing. Dickinson College Library. https://libguides.dickinson.edu/copyright/openaccess

Wiese, G. (2017). Coming together as ONE: How a Los Angeles magazine fostered the LGBT community. Undergraduate Research Awards, Hollins University. https://digitalcommons.hollins.edu/researchawards/33

Wyndham Robertson Library. (n.d.). Collection development policy. Hollins University. Retrieved September 19, 2025, from https://library.hollins.edu/colldevpolicy/