Igelu 2014 - Oxford
How subversive! And how it takes tosubert...
Alma Swan, director of SPARC Europe, Key Perspectives Ltd, Enabling Open Scholarship

Open access was proposed as an idea in June 1994 though it wasn't called that way yet. It was recommended authors post their papers on anonymous ftp sites. Shortly after the World Wide Web came along. Now there is over 35% of all disciplines publication open access, the majority is green (in depositories), a small part is gold (in subscription journals) and the rest is delayed open access, i.e. where publishers make the content of their journal available after a period of time (maybe 12 to 18 months).

But the trend is that the increase has been very slow and certainly has not progressed in the way that was expected. In terms of authors, there is a lot of misunderstanding or lack of awareness as well as fear of repurcussions especially from the publishers or for their career - changes that came with the web has been rather coldly received in academia... In terms of publishers, there has been some hindrance which reinforces the sense of uncertainty. Finally libraries have been hooked into big deals and therefore the space of manoeuvre has been limited, budgets have been frozen, policies made elsewhere (e.g. at the funder level which can be national), there has also been varying levels of buy-in in the notion of OA as everywhere else.

The drivers have been advocacy, as well as technical developments for appropriate infrastructure, new publishing venues and policies. Advocacy has collected evidence about benefits for authors to the point that it has to become the way of working in the digital age. Benefits include: visibility, usage, impact. This is a lso valid for institutions because they can better monitor and assess usage, it gives them competitive intelligence and facilitates outreach and better return for investment. Benefits for funders is that they can also monitor and assess their investment (ROI).

In terms of the infrastructure, we've developed systems from print to electronic, hyperlinking, interoperability and linked data (possibly). The EU has done some research on OA. Amongst other things, they've built OpenAIRE, its a harvester for metadata as well as content, readers can go there to collect articles they're interested in. Open Access policies have also been developed. There are now 222 institutional, 44 sub-institutional and 90 funder policies, so significant things are happening.

The areas of promise and their issues and challenges are:

• Books, because up until now the focus has been on journals
• Policies are growing in number and they must be mandatory and supported by good implementation; there's also a strong recommendation about convergence and alignment at a European level
• Humanities are increasily a point of interest with lots of new developments for OA journals and OA monographs so publishers are changing their business model; funders are waking up and institutions are developing new initiatives, e.g. covering the costs, institutional publising (university presses)
• Libraries also have a role to play, they have the right skills, the knowledge about users needs
• Technical initiatives, e.g. hypothes.is (kind of interactive book?...)
• Data developments with massive interest in Open Data and it may be the basis of open scholarship in the future - However the preservation and curation of data is a challenge!
• Changes in legislation and thinking about licensing and copyright which frees up the research community, although more thinking is required; we need a responsible licensing (e.g. not wise to sign agreements with publishers that limit OA or obsturct its aims)
• Text and data mining - we need a full research literature that can be open and mined - it is institutions' responsibility to support this; see TDM
• Ensuring that the OA system is sustainable

Next geneeration Library Services - Emerging roles and opportunities

Oren Beit-Arie, Chief Strategy Officer Ex Libris
[live-blog IGeLU Conference 2013, Berlin - please forgive typos etc.]

The context in which we operate today is significant, increase in scale and diversity of content type, increase in cost especially serials, economic challenges in many institutions, increase scholarly research and learning (e.g. MOOCS), increased pressure and competition for library services etc. there is also a greater value of the value of libraries. We are also moving increasingly on Cloud delivery, so this is our framework.

We started developing it about 6-7 years ago, including sfx, the knowledge base, Primo and Alma. So we supported both the front end and the backend. Collections in the way that library built them in the past is changing, we're moving away from the "bigger is better" and from ownership and we're going more towards access. Many libraries are paying attention to fulfilment rather than selection, that means that it's more geared towards the information need of the user. That means also moving from the "just-in-case" to the "just-in-time". The economy around the research activities is also changing, there are more cases in which access would be free but there is more attention towards the economy of the creation of content, i.e. who will pay for the collections? Is it the reader, the researcher, the library?

Data services: The goal is to maximise the benefits of sharing, optimise management and discoverability. The two areas of focus is the Alma community zone and the next generation linking, of which I won't talk very much today, except that there are paradigms of linking, for example the sfx knowledge base, it's about pre-computered strored links at the article level. The notion of the Alma community zone was introduced a few years ago because there was a need for creating more efficient management tools and this needs to be done in the library context, so the community catalogue in the community zone enables libraries to add to shared content, information to the user community, to add or use vendor information etc. so the bibliographic control is improved. By creating a community environment, we support collaboration.

All this information that is shared is made readily available for discovery services in a streamlined way, so that you shouldn't have to work hard to enable this. It is a work in progress, especially for something like e-books. We work with the advisory group, which is composed of a broad number of represenatatives of users from around the world and this group is helping us to pin down the model that works best for all (see yesterday's session).

Linked data has the potential to extend the level of sharing of knowledge between libraries and external sources. In libraries we are very collaborative within our own island, but linked data has a greater promise. We are interested in this, we think this concept is tremendously important for the content that libraries created and to outreach to external content. For example an activity we're involved in is DME which stands for Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana and we are testing this, it's an important activity that involves big players such as Google. Other examples include NISO bibliographic framework project, the W3C schema bib extend community group (Shlomo), the LC bibframe initiative etc.

Other things we are involved in is that we try to evaluate trends and needs in education and try to build support for those needs by creating new platforms. Users perceive (e)resources as free we-bresources ("found it in Google"), the value of access to electronic content is not recognised by users, and in this realm there is lack of recognition of the role of libraries. It is paradoxical because there is something good about this, you want the user to get to content as soon and easily as possible but the libraries are getting pushed aside because users are not acknowledging their involvement and this could impact on funding for libraries. Our project enables libraries to brand those products developed to your institutional needs so they are customised by your library and build awareness of your library. It is still in pilot stage, we haven't yet talked about it publicly. (See Academic Libraries existence at risk, suggested by @chrpr)

We are also taking initiative for open access because we are aware of the significant drive toward OA around the world. Publishers are starting to respond, maybe not always in the way we'd like to but there is a lot of activity around OA. We are following the debates especially between green and gold OA because we need to be aware of what it going on. CHORUS is a publisher initiative that is about enforcing the OA mandate by publishers, is this how we want the world to be modelled in the future, is it an opportunity for libraries? We want to discuss this with you and I would encourage you to come and speak to us about this. We are in a transition period. Primo is enabling OA and when we are looking at this, it raises an important question. Some content is totally open with unrestricted access and discovery, others have unrestricted discovery but restricted access. There is some bad stuff out there, there is closed access and closed discovery and this is not just about us. Do academics/researchers who create content understand that some of their output is blocked out? So there are lots of opportunities to create better management of OA. When we talk of different models for OA, we see that many librarires are engaging in this.