Assessing, Financing and Maintaining Open Access Infrastructures: a New Role for Libraries (Organisers: LIBER OA Working Group)

As part of the ongoing open access transformation in Europe, open and community-owned infrastructures have become more important (e.g., SPARC Europe Report on “Open Science Infrastructures”, the Coalition-S-commissioned Diamond-OA-Study or the SCOSS approach of collaborative financing). Open Access-related infrastructures can range from publication platforms (e.g. Openjournals.nl or Journal.fi), disciplinary repositories and preprint servers (e.g. Zenodo and arXiv) and search services (e.g. BASE, Sherpa/ROMEO) to Monitoring tools (German Open Access monitor or the ESAC initiative) and impact analysis services (e.g. Open Citations). An increasing amount of these infrastructures are maintained and/or financed by research libraries. Libraries could play a prominent role in the sustainability of these services. It is, furthermore, important to understand how the services are governed in relation to the needs of the user community.

Based on this perception, the LIBER OA WG wants to organize an interactive workshop to gain more insights in the field of open infrastructures and how the ecosystem for such initiatives work. We want to give participants room to discuss and assess the opportunities and risks while looking at leading examples.

Session outline/agenda
Welcome & introductions
Presentation about scholarly infrastructures, giving examples such as DOAJ, PKP etc. (speaker to be invited)
Presentation about the POSI (the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures) and SCOSS as frameworks for assessment and evaluation of new or existing infrastructures
Presentation about an example library supporting open infrastructures (invited speaker: Demmy Verbeke, Leuven University Library)
Breakout groups – exercise to investigate in examples of alternative publishing platforms compared with the POSI by using Jeroen Sondervan’s worksheet.
Summary and closing of workshop.