Opening Access, Closing Gaps: Rethinking the Collection Development Strategy for Open Scholarship

This poster showcases the development and implementation of a new collection development strategy for the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences (TSHD), with a particular focus on fostering open scholarship and supporting the shift from traditional publishing models to open access. This assumes collection development as an integral part of scholarly communication, recognizing that investing in open access is central to library collections and contributing to a more inclusive and equitable publishing landscape. The collection strategy aims to gradually shifting funding away from ‘closed’ content towards open access models. This is aligned with the newly adopted Tilburg University Open Science Framework, which expects publications to be open and encourages academics to participate in publishing activities not driven by profit motives. In the short term, the strategy focuses on open access book publishing, due to the collection needs of TSHD, an institution rooted in humanities and social science research, but also where there has been an underrepresentation of open access publishing.