The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is thrilled to announce a partnership with the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project to launch a pilot initiative aimed at improving infrastructure solutions for academy-owned scholarly publishing programs. This collaboration will focus on creating a unified discovery layer for diverse publishing platforms, presenting them as a single, shared collection of open access materials.
Funded by the BTAA, this initiative will see Penn State University Libraries and Indiana University Libraries working closely with the NGLP team to implement the Meru display layer. This effort will enhance infrastructure and service models specifically tailored for the BTAA. The project will involve migrating select content from partner catalogs into the NGLP ecosystem, improving interface design, and expanding the types of content displayed. The overarching goal is to support and strengthen academy-owned scholarly publishers with scalable solutions.
The University of Iowa Libraries, as part of a recent IMLS grant-funded project, will also collaborate with the NGLP team to build a production-ready instance of Meru, showcasing their full publication portfolio. The participating institutions aim to explore consortial approaches to campus-based publishing, achieving economies of scale, increasing the visibility and impact of members’ publications, and advancing infrastructure for Diamond Open Access publishing.
This initiative is part of a broader effort by the BTAA, California Digital Library, and Lyrasis to promote Diamond Open Access publishing in the U.S. These organizations recognize the importance of pooling efforts to realize the potential of Diamond OA, which supports no-fee scholarly publishing opportunities and ensures open access to academic research.
Collectively, faculty and researchers at BTAA member universities publish over 100,000 articles annually, supported by over $17 billion in research funding. These institutions produce over 15% of the U.S. research publications and are investing significantly in advancing public knowledge through open publishing.
Click here to read the original press release.
