Using Research to Expand the Transformative Agreement: A LYRASIS Case Study

Abstract:  In 2020, LYRASIS conducted a survey of their members to better understand predominantly U.S. institutional attitudes towards open content, including Open Access (OA) scholarship. The survey revealed several findings indicating that U.S. institutions cannot conform to the same OA models and strategies as their international counterparts. Likewise, a significant portion of institutions cannot participate in transformative agreements, at least not by the current definition. This presentation described the survey findings and how strategists from LYRASIS used what they learned to introduce OA into their negotiations in a way that increased participation from institutions of different sizes, missions, and research outputs, thus expanding the definition of the transformative agreement.

 

Building stronger infrastructures to support open access books: LYRASIS, DOAB and OAPEN | Directory of Open Access Books

In 2021, DOAB and OAPEN entered into a new partnership with LYRASIS to develop its services for U.S. partners. As the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) continues to grow, now including well over 50,000 open access books, Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication at LYRASIS, and Tom Mosterd, Community Manager DOAB-OAPEN recently discussed what libraries, publishers and other U.S. partners may expect from both open infrastructure services for open access books in the near future.

 

Building stronger infrastructures to support open access books: LYRASIS, DOAB and OAPEN

In 2021, DOAB and OAPEN entered into a new partnership with LYRASIS to develop its services for U.S. partners. As the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) continues to grow, now including well over 50,000 open access books, Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication at LYRASIS, and Tom Mosterd, Community Manager DOAB-OAPEN recently discussed what libraries, publishers and other U.S. partners may expect from both open infrastructure services for open access books in the near future.

LYROpen Fair Session 2: Exploring Open Content Revenue Models , 3/29/2022 11:00 AM ET

This session will explore the myriad models for supporting open publications, including the difference between green, gold and diamond OA, Subscribe to Open, Opening the Future, and transformative agreements, as well as an overview of the models currently supported through LYRASIS Open initiatives and ways to get involved.

LYROpen Fair Session 1: Link It, Find It, Count It – Open Research Infrastructure Programs at LYRASIS, 3/24/2022 1:00 PM ET

Description: Academic libraries, and institutional repositories in particular, play a key role in the ongoing quest for ways to gather metrics and connect the dots between researchers and research contributions in order to measure “institutional impact,” while also streamlining workflows to reduce administrative burden. Identifying accurate metrics and measurements for illustrating “impact” is a goal that many academic research institutions share, but these goals can only be met to the extent that all organizations across the research and scholarly communication landscape are using best practices and shared standards in research infrastructure. For example, persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as ORCID iDs (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) and DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) have emerged as crucial best practices for establishing connections between researchers and their contributions while also serving as a mechanism for interoperability in sharing data across systems. The more institutions using persistent identifiers (PIDs) in their workflows, the more connections can be made between entities, making research objects more FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). Also, when measuring institutional repository usage, clean, comparable, standards-based statistics are needed for accurate internal assessment, as well as for benchmarking with peer institutions.
 

To support institutional goals reliant on shared standards, LYRASIS serves as the community home for three consortial programs designed to lower the barrier of participation for libraries of different sizes, missions, and constituencies to use open research infrastructure best practices: the ORCID US Community, the LYRASIS DataCite US Community (for DOIs), and the IRUS (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) US Community. This webinar will cover the basics of these three programs as well as resources for learning more and getting involved.

 

At the end of this session, participants will:

 

Understand the open research infrastructure programs at LYRASIS and the basics of ORCID, DOIs, and IRUS
Know where to go/who to contact to get more information

 

Instructors

 

Paolo P. Gujilde, ORCID US Community Specialist, joined LYRASIS in May 2021. Paolo started his work in academic libraries in research services and transitioned into collection strategies and scholarly communications. He is actively involved in professional organizations especially serving and advocating for equity, diversity, and inclusion in library services. More about Paolo at https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9758-5740.

 

Sheila Rabun has worked in the academic library field since 2010, with a focus on digital workflows, agile project management, communicating technical information to diverse audiences, and advocating for interoperability in cultural heritage, research, and scholarly communication ecosystems. As the Program Leader for Persistent Identifier Communities at LYRASIS, Sheila manages the ORCID US Community and the LYRASIS DataCite US Community, working with non-profit organizations across the US to support open research infrastructure by using persistent identifiers to make research and scholarly content more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Learn more about Sheila at https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1196-6279.

 

Hannah Rosen is a Strategist for Research and Scholarly Communication at LYRASIS. Within the Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives team she is responsible for managing vendor and not-for-profit partnerships, including, but not limited to, digitization vendors, open access (OA) initiatives, and scholarly communication services. She is also a member of the Research and Innovation team, where she administers and publishes LYRASIS Research surveys and reports, and facilitates connections between LYRASIS research initiatives and events such as the Leaders Forums and the Annual Member Summit.

LYRASIS Research and an Inclusive Approach to Open Access in the United States | LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of the Association of European Research Libraries

In 2020, LYRASIS Research conducted a member survey of predominantly United States (U.S.) higher education libraries to understand the spectrum of attitudes and actions related to Open Access (OA). The results indicated that the U.S. approach to OA is decentralised, lacking the focused trends that are apparent in other areas of the world. The diversity among types of colleges and universities in the U.S. is revealed through discussions about support or lack thereof for APCs, crowdfunding models, preprint repositories, the Subscribe to Open approach, and more. The array of OA approaches that garner support in the U.S. may appear confusing as we strive for scale in our efforts. LYRASIS has used its research findings, in combination with our deep understanding of U.S. higher education libraries, to develop a collaborative approach towards OA that provides multiple incentives and opportunities for libraries serving all types of institutions to engage.

This article, expanding on the LIBER 2021 Conference Presentation of the same name, will outline the results of the survey, the conclusions LYRASIS has drawn, and our work to develop an inclusive approach to a variety of OA initiatives. Our understanding of the landscape of U.S. higher education has led us to develop or support several significant recent OA initiatives, including a fund for OA ebooks focused on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals topics and the establishment of the LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP).

 

Strategist, Content & Scholarly Communication Initiatives – – LYRASIS Jobs

“LYRASIS’ Content and Scholarly Communications team brings forward innovative new service and program offerings to the LYRASIS membership and wider library community, and continually manages and assesses established offerings for maximum effectiveness. The Strategist manages an assigned portfolio of offers and supports the department and larger organization by developing strategic opportunities, learning and executing the activities below in consultation with the department manager, teammates, and other internal and external stakeholders. The Strategist has proven skills and experience that allows assignment to his/her portfolio highly complex program offerings, requiring strong negotiation skills and expert license agreement management. Along with other team members, the Strategist contributes to the continuing evolution of the scholarly publishing ecosystem through the development of new models and programs to support Open Access publishing and open infrastructure services. The incumbent is able to execute the position’s responsibilities with a high degree of independence and can be called upon to be a primary LYRASIS representative with the major member, library, consortia, and vendor stakeholders.”

Open Access Book Programs: Answering Libraries’ Questions | Open Access Books Network

By Sharla Lair (Senior Strategist of Open Access and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, LYRASIS)

The library community is looking for new ways to use the funds they steward to open more scholarly content. There are fairly established strategies for funding open access (OA) journals, but many librarians have been asking:

What are the opportunities to direct funds to make scholarly books OA? And how do libraries evaluate these programs to determine whether library funds should be used to support them?

 

OA Book Programs: What are they and where to find them

The following is a fairly comprehensive list of OA book programs that are actively seeking funding from the library community:

Central European University Press Opening the Future
Knowledge Unlatched
Language Science Press
Liverpool University Press Opening the Future
Lever Press
Luminos
LYRASIS United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Fund
MIT Press Direct to Open
Open Book Publishers
Punctum Books
Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME)
University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission

Various entities are aggregating lists of these programs so that they are easier for libraries to find:

In the United States, LYRASIS maintains a list of all of the OA programs they support, including books programs.
Jisc also acts as a hub of OA ebook programs for UK institutions.
Libraries can also look to their peers for guidance. Some libraries are listing the programs they support like KU Leuven and the University of Kansas.

Evaluating Open Access Books Programs

Once you know where you can find these programs, you then need to evaluate them to determine whether your library wants to dedicate part of its budget to support any of them. It can be overwhelming to evaluate these programs, especially with decreasing staff and resources. So where is the best place to start? Libraries that do participate in OA book programs usually start by asking a few questions.

[…]

 

Open Research Infrastructure Programs at LYRASIS

“Academic libraries, and institutional repositories in particular, play a key role in the ongoing quest for ways to gather metrics and connect the dots between researchers and research contributions in order to measure “institutional impact,” while also streamlining workflows to reduce administrative burden. Identifying accurate metrics and measurements for illustrating “impact” is a goal that many academic research institutions share, but these goals can only be met to the extent that all organizations across the research and scholarly communication landscape are using best practices and shared standards in research infrastructure. For example, persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as ORCID iDs (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) and DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) have emerged as crucial best practices for establishing connections between researchers and their contributions while also serving as a mechanism for interoperability in sharing data across systems. The more institutions using persistent identifiers (PIDs) in their workflows, the more connections can be made between entities, making research objects more FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). Also, when measuring institutional repository usage, clean, comparable, standards-based statistics are needed for accurate internal assessment, as well as for benchmarking with peer institutions….”

Open Research Infrastructure Programs at LYRASIS

“Academic libraries, and institutional repositories in particular, play a key role in the ongoing quest for ways to gather metrics and connect the dots between researchers and research contributions in order to measure “institutional impact,” while also streamlining workflows to reduce administrative burden. Identifying accurate metrics and measurements for illustrating “impact” is a goal that many academic research institutions share, but these goals can only be met to the extent that all organizations across the research and scholarly communication landscape are using best practices and shared standards in research infrastructure. For example, persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as ORCID iDs (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) and DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) have emerged as crucial best practices for establishing connections between researchers and their contributions while also serving as a mechanism for interoperability in sharing data across systems. The more institutions using persistent identifiers (PIDs) in their workflows, the more connections can be made between entities, making research objects more FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). Also, when measuring institutional repository usage, clean, comparable, standards-based statistics are needed for accurate internal assessment, as well as for benchmarking with peer institutions….”

IRUS-US: Institutional Repository Usage Statistics Service

“LYRASIS is partnering with Jisc to form and administer a new IRUS-US community of users. Institutions participating in IRUS-US install the IRUS tracker, allowing Jisc to collects raw download data for all item types and processes those raw data into COUNTER-conformant statistics. Those statistics are aggregated in open access statistical reports, allowing institutions to: share usage information with individual researchers; share usage information with administration; compare usage information with peer institutions; and use usage information to identify national trends.

IRUS-US functions as a small piece of code that is added to IR, enabling a ‘tracker protocol’ that allows Jisc to collect the raw data. Current compatible IR softwares include Dspace, Eprints, Fedora, Figshare, Haplo, Pure portal, Worktribe, Equella and Esploro. Any institution using a software not listed above should contact LYRASIS and indicate their interest, and we will do our best to encourage the software creators to add IRUS tracker functionality into their software capabilities.”

IRUS-US: Institutional Repository Usage Statistics Service

“LYRASIS is partnering with Jisc to form and administer a new IRUS-US community of users. Institutions participating in IRUS-US install the IRUS tracker, allowing Jisc to collects raw download data for all item types and processes those raw data into COUNTER-conformant statistics. Those statistics are aggregated in open access statistical reports, allowing institutions to: share usage information with individual researchers; share usage information with administration; compare usage information with peer institutions; and use usage information to identify national trends.

IRUS-US functions as a small piece of code that is added to IR, enabling a ‘tracker protocol’ that allows Jisc to collect the raw data. Current compatible IR softwares include Dspace, Eprints, Fedora, Figshare, Haplo, Pure portal, Worktribe, Equella and Esploro. Any institution using a software not listed above should contact LYRASIS and indicate their interest, and we will do our best to encourage the software creators to add IRUS tracker functionality into their software capabilities.”

Call for Papers: The Global Transition to Open: Structuring Library Sustainability Toward a More Equitable Knowledge Ecosystem | Commonplace

We invite contributions to a series that explores how libraries are realigning their collections spending with their values around Open. We ask that abstracts of 300 words or fewer be submitted by Monday, September 13, 2021 (please see key details below). 

Libraries face a dizzying and growing array of open access investment opportunities. These range from open infrastructure to new open access publisher agreements. Although libraries can be motivated by altruism when investing in open initiatives, many are trying to embed “openness” into their collections strategies. This is much easier said than done when emerging open access models rarely mimic the legacy subscription or one-time purchase models upon which the library community has grown accustomed. This series seeks to examine the challenges and efforts underway at academic libraries as they make their way forward in this new environment. 

An article published in the Commonplace in June 2021 titled “Balancing Investments in Open Access: Sustainability and Innovation” inspired this upcoming series. In this article, Annie Johnson raises questions that many in the library community are starting to ask: 

“So how can we ensure that our support for open does not become unsustainable in the face of continued cuts to our collections budget? And perhaps more importantly, how can we make informed, strategic decisions about which initiatives to support (and which not to support) when each agreement takes so much time to evaluate, and staff are already spread so thin?”[undefined]

These are critical questions that all academic libraries are facing. We believe sharing our stories and learnings at this important juncture will help us to collectively navigate the challenges ahead and, critically, to create a more equitable and just scholarly communication system.

We seek proposals that will address topics or questions, such as:

What guiding goals and principles can help libraries make decisions and measure the efficacy of their spending?

How is “transformative” defined? What are we transforming?

How are libraries balancing local reading and publishing needs with the desire to transform global scholarly communications?

How do we bridge the organizational divide between collections and scholarly communications?

Who are the key stakeholders and how do we secure their buy-in?

When should we go it alone and when do we partner?

How do we align open knowledge practices and spending with issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice?

How can libraries talk to each other and/or across campus about these topics? 

What new top-down models encourage new, sustainable, and open frameworks (rather than just operate within the existing, legacy structure)? Who has implemented them, and how?

Describe strategies for libraries that do not have a Press at their university, that can still support local open scholarly publishing efforts.

Anything you think we’ve missed!

LYRASIS 2021 Open Source Software Report: Understanding the Landscape of Open Source Software Support in American Libraries

Abstract:  The LYRASIS open source software (OSS) survey was conducted in spring 2021 as a mechanism to better understand how institutions interact with and support OSS programs. For the purposes of the survey, OSS programs were defined as community-based programs specifically designed for GLAM institutions, such as FOLIO, ArchivesSpace (a LYRASIS supported community), and Omeka. This report provides institutions with an opportunity to see where their efforts fall amongst the activities of their peers in three categories: funding/supporting OSS, justifying OSS, and evaluating OSS. The first section covers how/how much institutions contribute to OSS programs, either through financial contributions or staff time devoted to program contributions/governance. The second section focuses on how institutions justify investment in OSS programs. The final section covers the ways that GLAM institutions determine the qualifications for OSS, their evaluation tactics, and their decision-making about long term OSS maintenance.

 

New Digital Platform Empowers Public Libraries and Patrons, Boosts Equitable Access to Knowledge | DPLA

“A powerful partnership of industry leaders today announced The Palace Project, a transformational, library-centered platform for digital content and services.  

The Palace Project, with a $5 million investment by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for LYRASIS, and in strategic partnership with Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), will develop and scale a robust suite of content, services, and tools for the delivery of ebooks, audiobooks, and other digital media to benefit public libraries and patrons.  …”