As members of the international library community, LYRASIS introduced the 2020 Open Content Survey Report, which focuses on open content activities within the United States (U.S.) surrounding Open Access (OA) Scholarship, Open Data, and Open Educational Resources (OERs). The report is Open Access and therefore freely available to be downloaded.
According to Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives LYRASIS, the data was analysed from 166 survey responses, representing largely academic libraries, with a smaller subset of non-academic libraries. Approximately 7% of respondents represented associate’s or associate’s dominant colleges, 13% represented baccalaureate colleges, 16% of respondents represented master’s colleges and universities, and 37% of respondents represented doctoral universities. Of the 27% of respondents who were not academic institutions, the majority represented public libraries.
The findings, especially as regards to how academic libraries financially support OA publishing, appear to have broad implications for how to build successful buy-in for OA programs inside and outside of the U.S. Some of the biggest takeaways are:
- The majority of American institutions do not financially support independent OA initiatives – the institutions that do financially support OA contribute to a variety of pricing models, with no one dominant trend.
- The majority of institutions do not support article processing charges (APCs). One interpretation of this data could be that APC-based business models are not attractive for sustainable OA scholarship in the U.S.
- Adoption of open data activities is still low within the U.S., with librarians focusing more on advocacy than actual data curation.
- The majority of libraries are not hosting or funding OERs directly, but rather ceding financial support for outside initiatives through consortia or state libraries, with these groups supporting OERs on their behalf.
We at ILI365 wonder how these results compare with open content support in other countries.
Update: On 22 July 2020. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) released a report, titled Investments in Open: Canadian Research Libraries’ Expenditures on Services, Staff, and Infrastructures in Support of Open Scholarship. Written by lead research Kathleen Shearer, one of the survey’s main findings is that the total, aggregate spending on open by the 28 responding libraries during the 2018-2019 fiscal year was $23 million CAD, with an average spend per institution of $827,086. Individual libraries spent between 0.88% to 7.23% of their total budget on open scholarship (average of 3.09%). The report further breaks down these investments into categories, including salaries for local services, advocacy, article processing charges, publisher memberships, and investment in hosting services for open access journals, monographs and repositories.