Telling the Story of How Open Access Benefits Society: A Vision for the Future - The Scholarly Kitchen

"During last fall’s Charleston Library Conference, I joined a panel discussion on how we are measuring the societal benefits of open-access (OA) publishing. Librarians, content providers, and service vendors face growing demand to measure how scholarly publishing (in particular OA publishing) enhances people’s lives – by reaching underserved populations, upgrading manufacturing standards, influencing better policies, or improving healthcare practices, etc. However, we lack best practices for leveraging usage data to assess social impacts, as our existing tools were designed to calculate returns on investments, such as universities and other organizations funding research projects and libraries subscribing to journals and databases...."