Session 1

Session 1: Open Access Management: cross-border cases

Date: Wednesday 5th July – 14.30-16.00

Location: CEU Auditorium

Chair: Andreas Brandtner, University Library of Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

1.1: From Chaos to Control: how Dutch university libraries collectively build, manage and use a data warehouse for open access management

Presenter: Arjan Schalken,  Dutch Consortium of University Libraries and the National Library of The Netherlands, The Netherlands

For many consortia and libraries, open access is a driver for change in both license management and research support. Reaching 100% compliant open access with limited budgets is challenging for both institutions and researchers. An important success factor is the availability of open-access management data. However, the lack of data format standards and a limited set of persistent identifiers, makes it impossible to easily combine open access related metadata sets, let alone use it for trusted business intelligence and decision support.

To get a grip on this chaotic playing field, UKB, the network of Dutch University libraries, started building a data warehouse in 2020. The first data services for both consortiums and libraries were launched within a year. By the end of 2022 the datahub contained a rich, structured and controlled metadata set related to more than 300.000 peer-reviewed articles, written by Dutch (co-) authors over the last five years inside and outside (consortium) publishing agreements.

Besides data from publishers, university research information systems and commercial databases, the data warehouse also harvests open databases like Crossref, Unpaywall and OpenAPC. The datahub is used to extract, transform, present and load open access-related metadata. Business rules are applied when multiple data sources present conflicting information, for example regarding the open access status of an article.

The results enable the consortium and university libraries to audit the quality of publisher reports and open-access publishing services including missed and non-compliant open access, the status of capped deals and long-term publishing trends. The datahub is also used to analyze open access costs outside of deals (‘APC’s in the wild’), to give libraries additional insight in articles that are missing in university research information systems and closed access articles that can be converted to green open access.

The presentation aims to explain and show in a non-technical way how the data warehouse works including the main challenges that were encountered when building it. The added value for negotiation teams, open access experts and contract managers is addressed with several practical use cases and a demo of the datahub. The goal is to share lessons learned and to inspire other libraries and consortia who want to get a grip on open access-related metadata that is essential for the development of their open access strategy, to strengthen their position to publishers and to help authors in publishing funder compliant.

1.2: Redistribution of costs in a world in transition: the evolution of consortial cost-sharing models in transformative agreements in Austria

Presenters: Rita Pinhasi and Brigitte Kromp, University of Vienna, Austria

Austria, a pioneer in the field, signed its first transformative Open Access (OA) agreement with the Institute of Physics back in 2014. The last near-decade saw a succession of contracts with all major, medium-sized and some society publishers against the backdrop of an explosion of similar agreements in recent years across the world, partly fuelled by the launch of Plan S in September 2018.

These agreements profoundly changed the OA landscape in Austria: it is estimated that around 80% of the Austrian Academic Library Consortium’s institutions’ research output is OA at the point of publication, benefitting the academic community and the wider society alike. The transformation also expanded the role of academic libraries in scholarly communication through advocacy, negotiating publishing contracts, implementing efficient OA workflows and liaising with publishers on behalf of researchers.

Alas, there are hardly any conversations around OA without the mention of costs. This is true for the Austrian academic library community as well, although, by and large, the subscription-only consortium contracts were successfully converted to OA deals in a cost-neutral manner. The consortium’s OA output could be maximised by pulling the resources together across the sector. However, the new business models introduced a level of disruption to the pre-transition status quo as the original distribution of costs, based predominantly on institutional legacy spend, did not match the emerging institutional-level output and potential associated costs.

This in turn prompted some questions: what does a fair and sustainable cost-sharing model look like in a world where the costs for reading and publishing continue to exist side-by-side? What parameters do we need to consider? Which methodology should we use? In order to answer these questions and to address the apparent imbalance in institutional spending, the consortium decided to take action early on.

This presentation will provide an overview of the evolution of the various cost-sharing models introduced for transformative agreements in Austria, from the very first model implemented in 2019 to the outcome of the most recent review concluded in December 2022. It will present data and considerations underpinning the models selected and the challenges the consortium has faced.

1.3: A Case Study on Open Access Management Challenges and Solutions in Finland

Presenters:
Martin Jägerhorn,  ChronosHub, Denmark
Kaisa Kulkki,  Tampere University, Finland

Open Access is changing the research ecosystem as the ways of accessing, publishing and managing research results are transforming. This gives rise to new challenges, especially for researchers who must navigate the rapidly evolving landscape.

Research libraries in Finland met these challenges daily. Finnish researchers often felt overwhelmed. What does a CC-BY license mean, is this a predatory journal, how can I pay for this article?

As highly research-intensive institutions, committed to driving Open Science and Open Access, Finnish libraries needed a holistic solution for managing all types of Open Access. The solution needed, in particular, to ensure more seamless workflows for the researchers and ease the burden for library and research administrators to manually collect and validate data, to stop researchers from drowning in Excel spreadsheets and email communication. There was also the need for a solution to the enormous APC expenditure that came on top of subscriptions.

To address these challenges, a collaborative approach has been adopted, working jointly between universities and with international partners for a sustainable and scalable infrastructure. In this way, bridges are being built across different stakeholders by integrating systems and workflows, in particular between researchers and publishers, where applying the FAIR principles has become a prerequisite for automation. This has led to significant progress to establish a more effective management of APC expenditure (Gold OA), ensuring an up-to-date monitoring of OA agreements (Gold & Hybrid OA), automating repository deposits (Green OA) and guiding researchers through their end-to-end author journey.

This presentation will share the speakers’ learnings and identified best practices. It will also highlight important remaining challenges and recommended community actions, as it’s only if more of us come together that we’ll be able to overcome some of the systemic issues.

53rd LIBER Annual Conference