James Madison University (JMU) Libraries, in partnership with the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), has been awarded $89,000 by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to convene a national forum of experts and stakeholders to address key opportunities and challenges in building a collective collection-development system for open access (OA) content. This 'OA in the Open' forum will engage participants in creative thinking around how a new collective funding model could be designed to minimise the creation of new membership organisations while simultaneously building community stakeholdership.
The national forum conversation is a critical step for academic libraries, whose operations, budgets, and workflows are optimised for print or licensed electronic content, including relationships with an array of service providers such as subscription agents. In contrast, OA content providers most often receive provisioning or start-up funds from grants, and then devise memberships in order to collect sustaining fees.
The OA in the Open project will include a series of focus groups in early 2019 at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, Washington; the Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference in Austin, Texas; and the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference in Cleveland, Ohio. With a total of 75 people participating in six focus groups, the project team will talk to a non-random but diverse sample of the academic library community about the conditions under which they could and would participate in openly and collectively funding OA content. The project team will report its key observations in a presentation immediately after the 2019 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum in Tampa, Florida, and produce a white paper to motivate the community toward collective action.
To help ensure representation from a multitude of perspectives and academic libraries of all sizes and types, the grant includes a travel scholarship fund to enable four people to attend each conference and participate in the focus groups. ARL will administer the travel scholarships to people who identify as members of a group (or groups) underrepresented among library practitioners; who work at community colleges, minority-serving institutions (MSIs), or historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs); or who could otherwise contribute to the diversity of the forum.
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