04. Library Success Stories
Libraries are a vital and omnipresent part of open access publishing. Institutional publishing, generally in the form of university presses, is one major facet of this. Beyond that, libraries are the primary funder of collective open access funding; they provide BPCs for their institutional authors, they are also often their academics’ first point of information about open research and open access publishing. Yet often, from the perspective of authors and some publishers, libraries are a more silent partner; a funder for OA authors and a customer for publishers.
As part of Copim Compass, we wanted to showcase examples of library initiatives within open access, many of which are to do with funding and resource-sharing, all of which highlight that the library is an active participant in OA publishing, and not the passive recipient of the end product.
Not included here are stories about OA success within individual institutional publishers, which belong in the Publisher Success Stories. If you want to recommend library success stories for inclusion in the Copim Compass, please feel to contact us at info@copim.ac.uk.
- Edinburgh Diamond
- How important are your values when you’re being squeezed?
- ‘How Open Investing Will Transform Library Collections’ Demmy Verbeke & Curtis Brundy, Katina Magazine
- Irish Open Access Publishers (IOAP)
- KOALA-AV
- Library Partnership Rating
- Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP)
- Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA)
- Platinum Open Access Funding (PLATO)
- SPARC Unbundling Profiles
- The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS)
- The White Rose University Consortium
- Trailblazers: an Open Access Monograph and Book Initiative for Early Career Researchers
Edinburgh Diamond
Edinburgh Diamond, part of the Edinburgh University Library, is a Diamond OA service provision which supports the publication of both books and journals by academic, staff and students at the University of Edinburgh. It began in 2009 but relaunched and grew notably in 2021, as a result of demand from academics.
It is entirely separate from Edinburgh University Press (although one board member of Edinburgh Diamond is an EUP staff member). It also provides information resources on book and journal publishing and on hosting and publishing services using open infrastructure. It has provided a venue for several University of Edinburgh academics, staff and students to publish their work.
Read testimonials from Edinburgh Diamond users
How important are your values when you’re being squeezed?
This was a presentation by Bethany Logan, Associate Director of the University of Sussex, given at a Jisc-hosted workshop on evaluating collective funding models for OA books. In it, she outlined the approach that had been taken by the library at Sussex when budget squeezes made supporting OA schemes more difficult and something that required more buy-in from other senior stakeholders at the university.
At Copim Compass, we would be very happy to link to other comparable presentations about how budget can be carved out to support OA infrastructures despite difficulties, if you are able to provide links to these, please share them via info@copim.ac.uk
‘How Open Investing Will Transform Library Collections’ Demmy Verbeke & Curtis Brundy, Katina Magazine
This article, published in Katina Magazine in late 2024, provides a comprehensive overview of current library perspectives on, and turning points in, library investment in open access and open infrastructure. It provides a brief history of this investment, an overview of the frameworks (both structural and values-related) that libraries can use to evaluate investment opportunities, and also rationales on how budgets can be used to support open.
Irish Open Access Publishers (IOAP)
IOAP is an initiative founded by Irish libraries in 2021 to strengthen Diamond OA publishing in the region. It provides a community of practice primarily for library-based and institutional publishers, providing a forum for them to share knowledge and experience.
The IOAP also engages a wide variety of national and international open access agencies in this dialogue including funders, policy makers, academic institutions, libraries, open access organisations, student bodies, lecturers, researchers and students.
Learn more about this initiative
KOALA-AV
This is a German consortial, government-funded funding project (2023-2025 ongoing). It collaboratively funds Diamond OA journals in Germany by creating a consortial library funding model. Currently it provides funds to a number of journals mostly in STEM fields. The participating journals have to adhere to a set of requirements based on those of Plan S, COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and others. It builds on the original journal pilot (2021-2023) by TIB Leibniz and Universität Konstanz.
Learn more about this initiative
Library Partnership Rating
The Library Partnership Rating is a collaborative and library-developed framework for librarians who seek to quantify the alignment of publishers with themselves as they consider investing library resources. It was first developed by Rachel Caldwell at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Robin Sinn at Iowa State University, although it now has a large advisory council made up of several libraries and publishers.
The current iteration of the rubric, which has been adopted and adapted by many libraries as they consider OA investment offers (among other resource requests from publishers), covers journals specifically. However, a working group is currently aiming to expand its coverage to books. As it is primarily a US-focussed resource, librarians in other regions wishing to adopt a similar rubric may need to localise some parts of it.
Learn more about this resource
Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP)
Lyrasis' OACIP provides a community-driven framework to evaluate and collectively fund Diamond Open Access journals.
It accepts journals (based on a set of principles listed on the website) to its catalogue and then tries to match them to funders, often library-based. Through this, it aims to provide sustainable and principle-aligned investment for Diamond OA journals. It began in 2021 and has continued to expand, with 8 OA journals fully funded for five years already, and the current catalogue holding many more.
Open Institutional Publishing Association (OIPA)
OIPA was launched in 2023 as a network for small/medium university presses and university-affiliated and library-based publishing initiatives. The majority of its members are either entirely or largely Diamond OA.
Its mission is to share experiences and existing resources for OA publishing, to support collaboration and networking within the community of institutional publishing, and also to provide a collective voice for institutional publishers and services.
Platinum Open Access Funding (PLATO)
PLATO was a project undertaken by six Swiss universities and funded by swissuniversities, the umbrella organisation of universities in Switzerland. It began by doing a landscape study of Diamond OA in Switzerland, and also aimed to develop a sustainable funding model for collaborative, community-driven OA publishing in Switzerland. This was done in advance of updates to the revised national open science strategy, and provided useful information about, and networking for, Diamond OA publishers in the region.
SPARC Unbundling Profiles
This is a series of profiles written by SPARC, providing detailed case studies from a series of institutions in the US and Canada who unbundled from Big Five publishing deals (in particular Elsevier and Wiley).
The case studies seek to provide useful information and experience for another libraries who may consider unbundling from/cancelling big journal packages. They detail how each library made these decisions, how they ensured necessary access to materials, how the rest of the campus responded etc.
While these have not been updated since 2020, the recent cancellations in the UK (at the Universities of Sheffield, Surrey and York) in 2024/2025 show that this is still very much a live issue and these case studies are still highly relevant to libraries as they consider their options in the difficult financial climate of 2025.
The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS)
SCOSS is a consortium of organisations, founded in 2017, whose mission is to secure OA and open infrastructure financially by providing funding to non-commercial services on which open access and open science depend.
So far, it has provided c. $6.5m to fund over 15 infrastructures, among them (and at first) DOAJ and SHERPA/RoMEO, and more recently DOAB, ROR, arxiv, AJOL and others. Many of the SCOSS members are library consortia or individual libraries.
The White Rose University Consortium
The White Rose University Consortium is a strategic partnership between the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield, and York founded in 1997.
It works to provide collaborative benefits across all three institutions, including research, seed funding and scholarships. Among its many activities is the running of White Rose University Press, an OA press founded collaboratively in 2016 which publishes monographs, journals and conference proceedings across a range of topics.
Learn more about the White Rose University Press
Trailblazers: an Open Access Monograph and Book Initiative for Early Career Researchers
Trailblazers is a joint initiative launched in 2024 between Lancaster University, the University of Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, and the University of Salford (joined by Liverpool John Moores University, University of Reading and University of Wolverhampton for 2025).
The collaboration between these institutions focuses on early career researchers (ECRs) to maximise the opportunity for their early career research impact via OA publishing. It provides author bootcamps and other forms of training to support ECRs as authors.
The ECRs selected go through the peer review and publication process of their monograph, which is published immediate open access via support from the participating libraries. As the initiative is new, the first outputs are still in process, although an interview with one of the participating ECRs is now available here.