Open access (OA) and the broad sharing of research outputs has
been empirically shown to accelerate scientific progress and benefit
society and individuals at scale through improved health outcomes,
socioeconomic mobility, and environmental well-being, to name a
few. Academic research libraries, for their part, have made significant
investments in opening up research and scholarship—particularly
research conducted on their campuses and made available through
journal subscriptions. Yet these investments are difficult to collect
given their distribution across many budget lines, the lack of
standardized reporting categories, and inconsistent data collection
practices.
Over the last two decades there have been a small handful of
organizations that have completed in-depth data collection efforts
for these expenses. In 2019, the Canadian Association of Research
Libraries (CARL) undertook a comprehensive survey of CARL member
libraries’ investments in open scholarship in order to have a better
understanding of what is being spent by Canadian academic libraries
on open services, platforms, content, and infrastructures. Relatedly, in
August 2017, a paper entitled “The 2.5% Commitment” was distributed
across the North American library community. The paper proposed
that every academic library should commit to invest 2.5% of its total
budget to support the common infrastructure needed to create the
open scholarly commons.
In May–June 2022 the Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
undertook a survey of its US-based academic research libraries to
better understand OA expenses. The survey found that the total,
aggregate spending on open content and infrastructure for all 46
responding libraries in 2020–2021 was US$32 million, with an average
expenditure per institution of $785,940. This represents an average of
2.26% of the total library budget spent on open scholarship, ranging
from 0.19% to 11.02% across responding libraries.
Authors
- Published in
- United States of America
