An "Open" discussion: Preliminary findings from an OCLC survey of open content costs and benefits

Abstract

Despite growing support for Open Science, Open Access, and Open Government Information, measures of impact, investment, and cost for libraries and research organizations remain largely unknown. How much are research institutions actually investing in infrastructures and services to support open content for academic and non-academic users? Without greater knowledge of the costs of human and financial resources that libraries are allocating to support open content, how can they make informed planning decisions? And, if the benefits for the library and its users are unclear, how can libraries measure how successful they are in realising those benefits?

To help inform meaningful discussions around these challenging questions, OCLC conducted a survey that focused on libraries' ambitions, realities, and investments in support of open content. This assessment collected data about library open content activities across multiple internal silos, including: e-resources management, institutional repositories, research information management/CRIS systems, digitised heritage collections, data archives, born-digital (legal) deposit, and more. This survey represents a significant early effort to qualify and quantify library efforts in the field of open content at an international scale. By late January 2019, 705 responses from 82 countries were submitted, offering a rich pool of information. Seventy-two percent of the responses comes from research and university institutions and from this subset we can distill the relative importance of CRIS-IR in libraries' open content activities.

In this presentation, representatives from OCLC Research will share preliminary findings from this global survey and discuss implications for the euroCRIS community and the broader open content ecosystem.