Financing change: KU Leuven’s Fair OA Fund – Open Access Books Network Blog

This post, written by Demmy Verbeke (Head of KU Leuven Libraries Artes), is an introduction to the next event in the ‘BoOkmArks: Open Conversations About OA Books’ series. A live session will be held via this Zoom link on 8th December at 16:00 CET/ 15:00 GMT/10:00 ET, when we will interview Demmy about KU Leuven’s Fair OA Fund. If you have questions for Demmy, please add them to the comments section below so they can be included in the conversation on 8th December — and join us at the event if you can!

by Demmy Verbeke

If you want change, try something new.

This seems comically simple advice, but it is advice that universities, worldwide, seem unable or unwilling to follow when it comes to building and maintaining the infrastructure for scholarly communication. The first reason to want change is the cost of this infrastructure, which has been considered problematic since the beginning of the twentieth century, and which has only risen since, high above the rate of inflation.

Secondly, concerns have been raised over and over again about how research output (and particularly how an individual scholar or an institution making use of scholarly communication infrastructure) has become intertwined with research assessment, and that the methods used for this assessment do not align with scholarly values. One example: assessing an individual scholar by the press where he or she publishes, which, in essence, equals outsourcing judgment to an external party who is not focused on assessing the quality of the work but its commercial potential.

A third reason is the well-documented issue that the current ecosystem is far from inclusive and operable – not only when considering researchers in world regions like Africa, Latin America, Asia and Oceania, but also researchers active in disciplines less likely to attract major funding.