Parallel Session 3 – Library Partnerships for Societal Impact I
Date: Wednesday, 2 July 2025, from 11:15 to 12:45
Moderator: Sara Lammens, Royal Library of Belgium, Belgium
Location: Room 2064
3.1) Episciences: Advancing Diamond Open Access Through Repository Integration and Library Partnerships
Presenter: Raphaël Tournoy, CNRS – CCSD, France
Episciences represents an innovative diamond open access publishing platform that demonstrates how existing open infrastructures can be leveraged to create a sustainable, academic-led publishing model. Rather than hosting content directly, this overlay journal platform builds upon established open infrastructures including arXiv, HAL, Zenodo, bioRxiv, medRxiv, Dataverse data-repositories, Software Heritage, and openAIRE services.
The overlay structure creates transparency by connecting published versions directly to their preprints. Readers can trace a work’s evolution from initial submission through peer review to the final published version. The platform also supports open peer review, with review reports available on open repositories, and enables peer review of datasets and software through data-papers and software-papers. Episciences’ ability to link publications with their underlying datasets and software code creates a complete integrated scholarly record, enhancing reproducibility and research validation. Through integration with Software Heritage for long-term software preservation, and connections to various repositories, Episciences ensures that all research artifacts remain accessible and citable, strengthening the scholarly record while supporting open science practices.
Using Episciences as a case study, this presentation will demonstrate how the overlay journal model operates in practice, examine current library support for such platforms, explore emerging opportunities for libraries in this evolving scholarly communication landscape.
A key strategic priority for Episciences is expanding connections with institutional and disciplinary repositories. This aligns with the growing recognition of repositories as essential open access infrastructures. Libraries, which often manage these repositories, are uniquely positioned to ensure research output preservation and discovery.
The platform’s diamond open access model eliminates both author and reader fees through cost-efficient publishing practices. As an endorser of the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access, and a platform open to any disciplines and languages, Episciences actively contributes to developing a sustainable, community-driven scholarly communication ecosystem that respects cultural, multilingual, and disciplinary diversity. This approach resonates with libraries’ commitment to equitable scholarly access and reduced publishing barriers. By empowering research communities to establish and manage their own journals, Episciences fosters an academic-owned publishing ecosystem where libraries can for instance contribute expertise in metadata management, publishing best practices, research support services, community outreach and education.
The platform’s recent selection for funding through the Couperin Consortium and Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) demonstrates growing institutional support. This funding model, where university libraries directly support Episciences and similar open infrastructures, reflects libraries’ commitment to reshaping scholarly communication.
Through its integration with open repositories, commitment to diamond open access, and support for academic-led publishing, Episciences advances core library values while contributing to a more equitable and sustainable scholarly ecosystem. We hope this presentation will facilitate discussion on how libraries can further engage with and support innovative publishing models that align with their mission and values.
3.2) The Standard, Leverage to Build Europe Confidence and Innovation
Presenter: Grégory Miura, Campus Condorcet, France
Among knowledge workers, standards is an ancient and powerful mean to guide, influence, guaranty and fulfill openness, efficiency and upskilling. Industrial and digital magnates use it since decades alongside marketing and financial activity as a way to control markets, open new opportunities and disseminate innovation. Despite this reality, librarians, archivists and other information, professionals are progressively loosening the bonds to standardization as part of our day to day activities because of a lesser understanding of its strategic impact.
After defining standards, the way the are produced and revealing their latest developments in the whole information, science and heritage fields, we explore actual and possible paths of a collective standardization journey. The presentation will address current standards, highlight projects and tackle future needs in order to bring environed work program able to fulfil our community needs and priorities regarding our involvement in society at large. From renewing the identification and information integrity system to addressing the continued growth in volume and diversity of native or transitional digital objects, there’s a huge need in establishing best practices and shared standards in the massive AI environment where our digital debt must turn into tokens. As environment, ethics, democracy and citizenship are at stake could play a major role in the empowerment and protection of people and digital governance, with regard to knowledge commons, access to a diverse information infrastructure and digital literacy, protection of personal data, social and environmental responsibility of the document, data and information space. Lastly, the future of our skills and processes remain mostly alongside the standards way as part of our need for to find a place for research and development activity within our organizations. Strengthening approaches around quality, skills or risk assessment, system and data/document flow coherence and interoperability constitutes the various facets of a reaffirmed professional identity.
We need a proper strategy to tackle these key domains and above all reintegrate standards processes in a relevant professional perspective. The proposed call to action will endorse a cross-domain approach that leads librarians to work more closely with other knowledge workers as archivists and records managers. Our community must follow closely the SMART standards development (Standards that are Machine Applicable, Readable and Transferable) at it has the potential of a profound renewal of applicability and openness of all the standards literature. As a closing remark, we are able to highlight that standards can play their part if we engage with it at a European level. We have to work hard on the recognition of the richness of all the LIBER community and their institutions and partners as a key component of the landscape within the European Committee for Standardization. Best practices serve as objective ally of regulation, as catalyst for professional know-how, and as building block of our professional identity. Let’s use it as an asset to open up to the world and converge in a redesigned collective effort to tackle global challenges.
3.3) Gradual Implementation of Open Research Information at VU Amsterdam
Presenter: Matthijs de Zwaan, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Many libraries play an important role in advancing open research practices at their institutions. At VU Amsterdam, the university library has actively taken up this role. Among other initiatives, we are currently working towards the adoption of more open data sources for research evaluation and assessment. To build trust with stakeholders such as researchers and policy officers, we follow a gradual strategy. This presentation will highlight three projects that show our incremental approach to the adoption of open research information.
The presentation will describe these projects’ methodologies, outcomes, and challenges while also discussing the broader context of library contributions to open research. Attendees will learn how VU library has worked with institutional, national, and international partners to innovate in research assessment and set up more transparent practices.
First steps to open research assessment
In one of our first projects working with open research information, the library’s Research Intelligence (RI) team supported a consortium of eight psychology departments from Dutch universities with the evaluation of their research output under the Dutch Strategy Evaluation Protocol. Following a proposal by the RI team, the consortium decided to integrate closed data from institutional research systems with open metadata from OpenAlex for bibliometric analysis. This approach allowed us to introduce open data sources with people used to proprietary data.
Fostering collaboration to advance open research information
In 2024, the VU was one of the first institutions to commit to promoting open systems in research assessment by signing the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information. We take part in the working group on “Replacing Closed Systems”, a working group that tries to lay out meaningful steps for any institution to replace proprietary systems like Scopus and SciVal with open alternatives, such as OpenAlex and OpenAIRE.
Contributing to open research infrastructure
Through collaboration with other Dutch universities, the library has played a significant role in advancing the Dutch Research Portal on OpenAIRE. We invest in the quality of the university’s research metadata, in first instance for the quality of our own reports. By making this curated metadata openly available, we also invest in open research infrastructures, allowing other projects to improve data quality and building trust with users and stakeholders.