Guest Post - Speak Finance: Gain University Support for Open Scholarship - The Scholarly Kitchen

"The federal government is rightly mandating that the knowledge and data produced from federal grants be widely available for our collective good. Despite the heroic efforts of the scholarly communication community, we remain under-resourced to make this happen. Let’s add some new metrics and language to this narrative to help articulate the value of libraries.

Within this community, there is an imperative, there is a will, and there is expertise to make scholarship and data, especially federally sponsored research, more accessible. But we remain challenged to turn the will and expertise into dollars to support the work. Federal research dollars continue to flow to universities but there are few budget increases to the libraries that make the resulting research accessible. To make the long-lived open scholarship work of research libraries more legible to university administrators and demonstrate that libraries are more than buildings for study, gathering, and warehousing, we can show impact in quantifiable and financial terms. We can gather and analyze data on a library’s impact on sponsored research itself. We can do this by conducting studies on the purpose of library use and tying that information to library expenses...."