25 July 2024
The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) has announced a partnership with the Next Generation Library Publishing project to test and expand state-of-the-art infrastructure solutions for our academy-owned scholarly publishing programs that are open source, community-led, and grounded in academic values. In order to enable greater discovery, dissemination, and preservation of BTAA-published content, the pilot project will create a single aggregate discovery layer for the many disparate publishing platforms of the participating libraries, enabling an experience of them as a single, shared collection of published open access materials.
Through this BTAA-funded pilot project, Penn State University Libraries and Indiana University Libraries will work with the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) team to advance their infrastructure and service models by implementing a scoped instance of its modular, open-source display layer, Meru, specifically for the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The pilot project will involve migrating select, diverse content types from the publishing partners’ catalogs into the NGLP ecosystem, implementing interface design improvements, and also expanding the types of content that can be displayed.
The BTAA-NGLP project envisions at-scale solutions that support and strengthen academy-owned scholarly publishers. This project will be aligned with the recently announced IMLS grant-funded project where the University of Iowa Libraries are collaborating with the NGLP team to build out a production-ready instance of Meru that showcases their full publication portfolio. All three institutions are looking forward to exploring the potential of consortial approaches to campus-based publishing that can help achieve economies of scale, increase visibility and impact of their members’ publications, and advance infrastructure for Diamond Open Access publishing.
This work is also a part of a broader effort, undertaken by BTAA, the California Digital Library, and Lyrasis to advance Diamond Open Access publishing in the U.S. The three partner organizations recognize the need to pool their efforts and combine their strengths to help realize the potential of Diamond OA as a critically important pathway to open scholarship, supporting equitable (no-fee) scholarly publishing opportunities and ensuring open access to the results of academic research.
Kate McCready, visiting program officer for academy owned scholarly publishing at the BTAA says of the initiative, “The BTAA’s Center for Library Programs is invested in the exploration of Diamond Open Access publishing solutions that enhance the production quality and create efficiencies at scale for our campuses.”
The Big Ten Academic Alliance continues its advocacy for a sustainable and open ecosystem of publication. Collectively, the faculty and researchers of member universities publish over 100,000 articles a year and are supported by over $17 billion in research funding. BTAA institutions are investing significantly in furthering their core research mission by advancing public knowledge through open publishing. Together, they produce over 15% of the research publications in the United States. Strengthening the collective capacity for publishing these outputs is essential to the mission of BTAA Libraries to advance open and equitable scholarly publishing models.