Cultural heritage organizations have long struggled to ensure their users cost-effective, widespread information access. This situation presents challenges and opportunities, both of which have evolved over time. The open content movement has expanded that challenge to supporting and advocating for content free of barriers and paywalls. Open content touches many areas of librarianship, but it is often difficult to understand how libraries approach this movement through internal activities and external financial support.
The LYRASIS open content survey was conducted in early 2020 as a mechanism to better understand how (primarily academic) libraries within the United States participate in the open content movement. The survey specifically focused on participation in activities/financial support for open access (OA) scholarship, open data, and open educational resources (OERs).
The core output of this survey is the 2020 LYRASIS Open Content Survey Report
[Clip]
Authored by Hannah Rosen, Strategist for Research and Scholarly Communication, and Jill Grogg, Strategist for Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, the study is based on a survey conducted in early 2020 as a mechanism to better understand how (primarily academic) libraries within the United States are financially supporting and advocating for open content both inside and outside their institutions.
Key findings of the Study Include:
Across academic libraries, institutional repositories for OA scholarship are widely adopted regardless of institution size. However, libraries have limited sway over faculty participation in their IRs.
Source: LYRASIS 2020 Open Content Survey Report
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.
Open data adoption and hosting is lower than other areas of open content; academic and public libraries are beginning to host different forms of data, but most are still more likely to advocate for data curation than performing the work itself.
Source: LYRASIS 2020 Open Content Survey Report
The majority of academic libraries do not host or provide access to OERs in their repositories. Rather, they choose to support local or state level initiatives that organize and disseminate OERs.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
From a Letter by Ithaka President Kevin Guthrie: I recently shared the 2023 priorities ITHAKA has set to help provide the infrastructure the academic community needs to support research, teaching, and learning ...
Here’s the Full Text of HathiTrust Announcement: HathiTrust, a member-based organization hosted by the University of Michigan, has received a 5-year, $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to fund ...
From UMass Amherst Libraries (Full Text): The University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce the publication of The UMass Amherst Libraries Falcon Curriculum: An Open Source, Common Core PreK-12 ...
From the Annenberg School of Communications/U. of Pennsylvania: In a new report, “Americans Can’t Consent to Companies’ Use of Their Data,” researchers asked a nationally representative group of more than ...
From Fast Company: More than 50% of academics have used piracy websites like Sci-Hub in order to bypass paywalls for research they want to access, according to a recent study published in ...
AI Models Spit Out Photos of Real People and Copyrighted Images (via MIT Technology Review) California: Orange Unified School District Reinstates Digital Library After Parent Concerns (via Voice of OC) ...
The article linked below (full-text) was recently published Reference Services Review. Title Libraries Advancing Health Equity: A Literature Review Authors Amanda J. Wilson National Library of Medicine Catherine Staley National ...
From the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board: Anyone who has spent time on a bookmobile has learned enough to know nothing withstands the change of time. Still, we lament the slow ...
From The Library of Congress (via a 4 Corners of the World Blog Post by Anchi Hoh): The African and Middle Eastern Division is delighted to announce the rerelease of the ...
From the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA): The chart [monitoring report]…is an updated version of previous monitoring reports. Where a country has been updated or added since ...
Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Seeks to Hire Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Developing a Globally Fair Pricing Model for Open Access Academic Publishing (via cOAlition S) Majority of ...
From The NY Times: In 1931, the first library in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, opened its doors — to white patrons only. Nearly a century later, Kenyans dressed in the slinky ...
Cultural heritage organizations have long struggled to ensure their users cost-effective, widespread information access. This situation presents challenges and opportunities, both of which have evolved over time. The open content movement has expanded that challenge to supporting and advocating for content free of barriers and paywalls. Open content touches many areas of librarianship, but it is often difficult to understand how libraries approach this movement through internal activities and external financial support.
