Open is in many ways the loadstone that the broadly defined world of the scholarly endeavor is driving towards. Whether it is in the form of repatriating to the scholarly community the thrice paid for (by academe’s unpaid authors, editors/reviewers [mostly], and libraries) research outcomes or the increasing release (with appropriate restrictions for privacy, cultural sensitivity, or locations of protected species or artifacts) by the world’s cultural and scientific institutions of collections in the public domain. Many barriers remain to removing the enclosures on the public domain or already financed research, the arc is clearly trending towards open.
The report of a survey done in late 2018 is clear documentation from a broad spectrum of research and university libraries that open is the clear trend. With a total of 705 respondents from 82 different countries completed, or partially completed, the survey asked the meta-question of “What is the status of open access and open content in libraries across the globe?” (Forward).
As open content is important to users of all types of libraries, however, the survey included libraries of all types: national, public, special, and academic (p. 10). The report also clarifies that:
For the purposes of the survey, open content was broadly defined as “the full range of freely available, unrestricted, online content of any kind,” acknowledging that “open” is a continuous construct (p. 10).
Focusing on the production of open content in research and university libraries, three areas stand out: 1) managing the institutional repository with open access content, 2) digitizing and making their analogue collections open (available online, in the public domain), and 3) managing their digital library with open collections (p. 8).
Each of these areas is carefully defined and it’s best to let the report speak to the categories directly:
Producing open content
Advocacy and policies enabling access to open content (includes data standardization
efforts and staff training)
Publishing open content (i.e., the library as publisher)
Digitizing collections (includes efforts to clear rights and make the collections available in the public domain)
Data services (i.e., research data management activities)
Supporting authors/researchers/teachers in creating open content
Bibliometrics (includes measurement of research impact for the campus)
Making open content discoverable and usable
Supporting users/instructing/digital literacy programs
Selecting open content not managed by the library (includes a broad array of back-office
efforts to make externally produced open content available locally, such as linking to open content in catalogs or LibGuides and e-resource management licensing)
Promoting the discovery of open content (includes efforts to make open content easier to find and use, such as OA buttons)
Deep interactions with open content (includes the provision of services and platforms to help users interact with open content, such as APIs for text mining or data visualization tools)
Assessment (i.e., evaluation of the library open content activities)
Collecting and managing open content
Institutional repository
Digital collections library
Born-digital (legal) deposit / Web archive (p. 10-11)
Institutions surveyed were no newcomers to the various areas highlighted as important. More than three years of experience in the following areas were indicated by over 70% of respondents:
Institutional repositories (75%)
Digital collections library (74%)
Digitizing collections (72%)
Supporting authors (71%) (p.19)
Respondents also indicated that the most mature of these technologies/programs were funded by a direct budget line item (Institutional repository at 54% and Digital collections library at 74%, p. 21).
The increasing focus on research data and data services is indicated in the survey. “Data services stands out as the open content activity for which the highest number of respondents (50%) report having an FTE allocation” (p. 21) and “Data services, for which 77% of respondents want to accelerate the impact” (p. 25). It should also be noted that the second highest category with an FTE allocation is bibliometrics (p. 21). This seems to indicate that the amount of data surrounding scholarly communications and related areas is a prime area for deeper analysis and creating clear metrics.
Interestingly, the flip side of data services is the response to “selecting open content not managed by the library, which only 39% want to accelerate” (p. 25). This response bears some digging into. Is the reason that the sheer amount of open content is expanding rapidly so that the manual selection process is no longer feasible or perhaps the discoverability of the open content for end-users has been so improved that, again, curating the content is neither necessary or practical.
As the report comments:
This corresponds to the observation made above that Data services rank comparatively low among current open content activities, but highest among planned activities, while Selecting open content not managed by the library ranks much lower among planned activities. Given that both activities are rated comparatively low on successfulness, we are seeing a strong prioritization on Data services and expected growth in the future (p. 25).
An interpretation of this data is that we should expect to see more staff involved in data services and less in the more traditional area of curated lists of resources.
The survey also digs into the relative importance of open content beyond the confines of the institutional campus. Respondents were asked to assess impact for open content in three areas: global, national/regional, and consortial.
The top activities are somewhat self-evident:
Digital collections library: global (17%), national/regional (16%), consortial (16%)
Data services: national/regional (18%), global (17%), consortial (10%)
Publishing: global (17%), consortial (16%), national/regional (11%)
Deep interactions with open content: global (17%), consortial (14%), national/regional (12%) (p. 27)
The clear takeaway, however, is that the impact of open collections is not limited to consortial partners or even national/regional areas. Open content is intrinsically tied to global impact.
In looking at their own open content, research and university libraries consistently rate “Discoverability of open content and Standardization of metadata are the top two research areas most relevant to their open content efforts” (p. 29).
In summary, open content is here to stay and will continue to trend upwards:
The survey revealed widespread and growing library engagement across the full range of open content activities … They consider their open content activities as successful, and the overwhelming majority are stepping up their current activities and planning new ones. (p. 31).
COVID-19 Caveat
As with nearly all research done in the months preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, there is likelihood that the trends or outcomes originally predicted will be impacted by the still unknown long-term impacts of the pandemic. To that end the report notes:
The survey data was collected at the end of 2018 through the beginning of 2019 and reflects a snapshot in time of a pre-COVID-19 landscape. We are seeing unprecedented initiatives to make scientific literature, findings, and datasets relating to COVID-19 available as open access to accelerate research and the development of effective medical practices and treatment. This is a huge boost for the recent trend to open research data and scientific information at scale. The importance of online access to collections has never been demonstrated so compellingly as during the pandemic. It will be interesting to see the lasting impacts of these developments on libraries’ support of open content (p. 31).
July 29, 2020 | Find Online
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