On Wednesday, November 6, from 2:00 – 3:10 pm , Roger Schonfeld will join Barbara Dewey (Penn State University),  Julia Gelfand (University of California, Irvine), and Dan Cohen (Northeastern University) for a panel discussion, “Library Collections: Creatively Adjusting Budgets to Invest in Open Content,” at the Charleston Conference. For more information and to register, please see the conference website.

About the panel

Building on the 2019 ACRL/SPARC Forum on Collective Reinvestment in Open Infrastructure, this program will explore how libraries can make different commitments to fund content created by open infrastructures. Library collections increasingly promote and reflect such open content and many have chosen to contribute to funding those products. There is not one formula or roadmap to underwrite the publishing and distribution costs of these open resources. There are many variables and considerations as some open content corresponds to serials and others are books or monographs. Open access content is increasingly found in nearly all subject areas. Open access does not come without a price to create, maintain and preserve the outputs. Libraries are reconsidering whether they want to commit so much to purchase materials or subscription-based products, when it is unclear what the anticipated use of any materials will be over time. Planning and opportunities for new and more flexible decisions concerning adjustments to and expenditures of the materials budget are under exploration by libraries. There are many options to invest in creating more content to be released as open access. Such options include contributing financially from the Library collections or materials budget to subsidizing or covering APCs, engaging in a more “library as publisher” model hosting journals, publishing books, creating OERs, and offsetting other expenses that ultimately drive a more intensive open infrastructure. Library leaders and partners will share their ideas about trying different approaches to contribute to more open publishing initiatives and explore whether efforts in deploying current book and serial costs to offset opportunities to build a wider and more open infrastructure is on the horizon. Questions will be solicited ahead of time to reflect audience’s interest in such a rethinking of the library collections budget.