The Next Generation Library Publishing project is thrilled to announce a partnership with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) 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.
For additional Information Contact:
Big Ten Academic Alliance
Kate McCready
kate.mccready@btaa.org
612-325-8762
Next Generation Library Publishing
Sarah Lippincott
sarah@educopia.org
About the Big Ten Academic Alliance
The Big Ten Academic Alliance is the nation’s preeminent model for effective collaboration among research universities. For more than half a century, these world-class institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed and funded by the provosts of the universities, Big Ten Academic Alliance mandates are coordinated by a staff from its Champaign, Illinois headquarters.
On August 2, 2024, four new universities will be joining the fifteen world class libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance: the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, the University of Oregon, and the University of Washington. Collaborations are already underway with the libraries of the current member universities: Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of
Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Chicago.
Big Ten Academic Alliance Snapshot
Big Ten Academic Alliance Fact Sheet
About Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP)
NGLP launched in the fall of 2019 as a collaboration of Educopia, the California Digital Library (CDL), and Strategies for Open Science (Stratos) with funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The project takes a holistic approach to creating transformative change in scholarly communication: using academic values and principles as the basis for software development, governance and business modeling, and pilot implementation of library publishing solutions.
About Indiana University Libraries
Founded in 1820, Indiana University Bloomington has grown from a small state seminary into the flagship campus of a great public university with over 49,000 students and over 3,100 faculty. The Bloomington, Indiana, campus is home to Indiana University Libraries, one of North America’s leading academic research library systems. Our collections, people, and spaces use knowledge to inspire great work.
IU Libraries partners with every academic department on campus. Materials are digital, visual, audio, and print. Over 60,000 journals are offered electronically, and the libraries hold more than 10 million print volumes in 450 languages and 120,000 films in its Moving Image Archive. Indiana University’s librarians actively collect and conserve knowledge and are leaders in national conversations in areas such as diversity initiatives, digital preservation and associated technologies, the changing role of area studies librarianship, and integrating information literacy. In addition, the IU Libraries are the organizational home of Indiana Publishing, which brings together the work of the highly respected Indiana University Press with the IU Libraries’ open access publishing initiatives.
IU Libraries actively participate in local, national, and international initiatives that will define collections and services of the future. Memberships include regional and national associations and consortia, including the Big Ten Academic Alliance Center for Library Initiatives, the Association of Research
Libraries (ARL), the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and the Samvera community. IU Libraries is a founding member of HathiTrust, a shared digital repository.
About Penn State University Libraries
Since 2003, the Association of Research Libraries’ metrics consistently recognize Penn State University Libraries among the top 10 research libraries in North America. An academic unit with a dean and tenure-line librarians, the University Libraries aims to inspire intellectual discovery and learning and supports all residential and online students, faculty, staff, and Pennsylvania residents, reflecting the University’s land grant mission. Library locations on all Penn State campuses operate interdependently as “one University
Libraries, geographically dispersed” with extensive shared physical and digital collections to help students succeed in academic and research pursuits.
Tags: CDL, NGLP, Open Access
