The Cost of Funding: Drafting a policy to promote financial support for Open Science — The Case of the University of Liège Library

For almost two decades, the University of Liège Library has provided financial support to various Open Science initiatives. The decisions underlying this financial support have often been made on a case-by-case basis. However, to make this support transparent and sustainable, it is essential to establish clear guidelines for selecting what open initiatives or infrastructures to support and the extent of this financial support.

We therefore worked on drafting a common policy, looking first at eligibility criteria. To do so, we examined two distinct existing tools: “Infrafinder” for open infrastructures and the survey tool “How Equitable is it?” for open-access publishing programs or initiatives. While these frameworks are useful for establishing criteria (such as governance models, technical attributes, etc.), drafting a common policy entails a series of trade-offs and challenges that go beyond these tools.
One of these challenges includes defining both what criteria to use and the relative weight that can be assigned to each criterion, especially as the perception and relative importance of criteria may vary significantly among stakeholders. Another challenge is the articulation of these eligibility criteria with more local-oriented or institutional needs and expectations (e.g. the language(s) of outputs or infrastructures, their disciplinary or context-specific nature, etc.).
Finally, an ongoing question remains how to determine budget allocation. One possibility currently hinted at is to equate the total budget for our policy with the yearly amount of APCs paid by our institution to hybrid journals, which can be found on the OpenAPC platform as a result of the library’s monitoring efforts.
Our poster details some of the steps and challenges underlying our ongoing policy-drafting to promote financial support for Open Science. One of our takeaways is the need to envision such a policy with clear and transparent guidelines and criteria comparable to those found in a collection development policy.