Joint OPERAS-P and COPIM report "Academic Libraries and Open Access Books in Europe: a Landscape Study" | COPIM

Morka, Agata, and Rupert Gatti. 2021. Academic Libraries and Open Access Books in Europe: A Landscape Study. Living book https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.f710a335. PDF https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4483772 Executive summary: The last fifteen years have witnessed the emergence of a new role for academic libraries. Besides fulfilling their fundamental task of providing access to knowledge, besides being called everything from temples of knowledge to disturbing heterotopias, libraries have become one of the crucial stakeholders in the open access book publishing space. They act as funders for OA book fees, they support collaborative funding schemes, and sometimes they assume the role of publishers themselves.  In an attempt to create a sustainable publishing environment, in which OA books could blossom, it is therefore necessary to gain a sound understanding of how academic libraries work, how they deal with open access initiatives, and what challenges they encounter. These questions remain at the very core of this report. The landscape painted in this report is by no means exhaustive; there are many more countries in the European community, other than the fourteen we have looked at, that need further investigating. The sample that we have taken under closer inspection proved to be a lively and diverse organism that escapes any easy overarching classifications. In order to better understand the role of academic and research libraries in Europe regarding open access books, we have looked at several crucial aspects that would help us both identify common threads and pinpoint regional particularities. We have examined each country according to the following areas of interest: general characteristics of library systems for e-content and OA publications, library community and open access, OA book policies, OA book funding, library/scholar-led OA book publishing initiatives, and integration of OA books in library systems. A general look at academic libraries’ systems in the chosen fourteen European countries has revealed certain polarities. While in some countries libraries enjoy relative autonomy in their decision-making processes and budget spending (e.g. Germany, Norway), in others they rely heavily on centralised systems, where Ministries of Education play a decisive role in the state budget allocations per institution and collection building on a national, rather than institutional, level (e.g. Croatia, Poland). It is a common practice across Europe for libraries to come together and form consortia which represent the collective interests of participating libraries, especially when it comes to discussing deals with major publishers and negotiating terms of access to the e-content. Such organisms can develop on a regional (e.g. Spanish regional consortia), national (e.g. Couperin in France) or even transnational level (GASCO for German speaking countries, including Germany, Austria, and Switzerland).  The European library community is characterised by the presence of numerous library associations, which treat open access as one of the critical points of discussion. On the one hand, well-established librarian networks with long history (e.g. the Italian Libraries Association, established in the 1930s, or BAD, the Portuguese Association of Libraries in Archives, established in 1973) have created special interest groups to deal with  OA-specific topics. On the other hand, new organisations united around the issues of open science are emerging in the European library community (e.g. ENABLE! in Germany). The abundance of these initiatives across Europe shows the scale and importance of library engagement in open access publishing practices. OA book policies are slowly being  introduced across Europe. Only three out of the fourteen countries we looked at have introduced national OA policies that include books (France, Poland, the Netherlands). Slovenia, in its OA national strategy, encourages - yet does not mandate - OA for books. Institutional OA mandates exist in all investigated countries, with some also having funder-specific OA requirements (e.g. NWO, the Dutch Research Council).  OA book-specific funding remains a rarity in the countries we have looked at. Out of the fourteen cases, only four countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and Norway) have dedicated OA book funds, some on the national, others on the institutional or funder’s level. The presence of such funds in these four countries does not come as a surprise: they are also among the European pioneers of the open access movement. In the remaining ten countries, OA book publications are most commonly funded through researchers’ grants, with a pool of the grant money allocated towards OA publication fees. Library- or scholar-led OA book publishing initiatives have not (yet) gained m