by Library News
SPARC presentation at UTA Libraries on Open Educational Resources and Open Access
Nick Shockey (left), Director of Programs & Engagement for SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) visited UTA Libraries on September 22, 2016.
“SPARC works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education. As a catalyst for action, SPARC focuses on collaborating with other stakeholders—including authors, publishers, libraries, students, funders, policymakers and the public—to build on the opportunities created by the Internet, promoting changes to both infrastructure and culture needed to make open the default for research and education.”
It has been well documented, serial prices have steadily increased and, in some cases, increased dramatically in the past decade while general inflation hovers around 1%. For example, in last fiscal year, UTA Libraries paid $1,671,035.86 for journals published by Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, and Taylor & Francis. Even with a modest (in serials’ terms) 4% increase, we are looking at $66,841 dollar increase for this fiscal year just to maintain what we have. Libraries and scholars are facing a huge challenge in sustaining information resources, and sometimes it can feel like being shot in the barrel. We need a paradigm shift and (R)evolution to change this picture.
UTA Libraries established a Scholarly Communication Division to lead the revolutionary work in Open Access and knowledge creation.
Several new positions were created to respond to the change. They include Director of Publishing, Director for Research Data Services, and Open Education Librarian.
We also use collection budget to support open access and make deliberate efforts to shift from down-stream acquisitions to up-stream acquisitions; and from outside-in to inside-out acquisitions. For example, the libraries established an Article Processing Fund (APC) to help faculty publish in open access journals. A matching amount was allocated within the collection budget to double the size of the APC fund. Collection budget is also strategically used to support global open access initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched and Open Book Publishers.
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