Libraries and their Role in Open Access: Challenges and Opportunities

The open access movement gains momentum with an increasing number of institutions and funders adopting open access mandates for their funded research. Consequently, an increasing amount of material becomes freely available, either from institutional repositories or from traditional or newly established journals. Libraries can play a dual role in supporting this movement: Firstly, they can provide services supporting the deposit of research output in their institutional repositories, including support for making it widely discoverable via indexes such as Google Scholar and library discovery systems. Secondly, libraries can make open access materials discoverable by their patrons through such indexes, thus expanding their collection to include materials that they would not necessarily license.

This session will describe the experience of the University Libraries of Liège in Belgium and Harvard. University of Liège chose a top-down approach and made it compulsory for researchers to deposit their output in the institutional repository—ORBi. To support this mandate, the library offers services that help researchers deposit and disseminate their publications. Both libraries—Liège and Harvard—enable their students and faculty to discover open access content beyond their library’s acquired collection via their library discovery system.

The session will also address challenges that arise from indexing open access publications and how index providers and libraries can deal with such publications, especially with articles that are deposited in different institutional repositories or published in so-called hybrid journals that contain a mix of open access and subscription articles.

Finally, we will discuss with the audience how they see libraries’ role evolving in this area, what challenges they are currently facing, and the solutions and opportunities they have found.