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Organizing for Open:

Aligning Organizational Structures with Open Values

October 24, 2024

Diana Castillo & Cara Key

Oregon State University

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How can our library organize positions and resources to support open scholarship?

What does it mean for an academic library to reorganize around open?

…or…

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About Oregon State University

Nearly 38,000 students
Land, Sea, Space and Sun grant institution
R1 (doctoral, very high research activity)
$5-6 million library materials budget
Central research support (including library) is less than you would expect given our size and research output.

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Context for this change

OSU

Prosperity Widely Shared
Resources shifting to salaries
Conference realignment

OSUL

Open Positions
Work spent managing paywalls

Collections

Negotiating principles
Elsevier pause
Shift in faculty/admin support

DC

Why these questions & why now —>

The context

Our approach to building consensus around them

And why we need to proceed with intention and care.

So let’s start with context—

AT the OSU level

We have an aggressive new strategic plan. It is a different kind of plan than we've had before – big stretch goals, but also concrete revenue-generating strategies and a very concrete narrowing/focus of our research/impact areas.

At the same time – new pressures on our tight resources, one a good problem and one a bad one. Good problem = Labor negotiations = more money shifting to salaries
Bad = Conference realignment. While the Pac-12 is being rebuilt, there are costs associated with both the initial collapse and it’s rebuild that will impact the university

Within OSUL

Empty positions and pressure to fill them - we came out of the pandemic with a number of empty positions
A lot of our current work is spent managing subscriptions and paywalls.

Specific to our collections

Campus principles for sustainable scholcomm - Open & Sustainable Scholarly Communication Advisory Group commissioned in 2019 and started in 2020, and established a formal set of principles around open scholarship that were approved by faculty senate
Very visible pause in our Elsevier subscription followed by a reduced spend
New tone in faculty conversations. But then we swing back around to those strategic plan goals.

2 concerns:

1. Walk and talk issue - values alignment

Stated goals, values and commitments — without accompanying changes to structures like org charts or budget lines

2. Change resistance

—Pandemic exhaustion

—15 years ago ended a really tumultuous decade — something like six major reorgs in 10 years

Not interested in more with less, but that is the history we have.

To overcome that baggage

Need to build a case for change that is grounded in values

“Starting place for your transformation journey is grounded in the why”

But language aside, this seemed like a solid approach

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Starting the Conversation

White paper
Goals:

Provide context
Build consensus
Ground further discussions
Open lines of communication

CK

At this point, you have gotten a sense of where we were coming from as we started to consider this idea. Our leadership wanted to approach what were expected to be major fundamental changes in a deliberate and intentional way, beginning with an organization-wide conversation. In order to establish a common starting point, our Dean asked several library faculty members to produce a white paper addressing what it might mean for the library to organize around open.

The white paper group was meant to represent multiple perspectives, on the concept of Open and on the library organization. It was headed by our Scholarly Communications Librarian and included our Collection Assessment Librarian, Diana who is our College of Business/Social Sciences Data Librarian, and myself as the Digital Repository Librarian. The intended audience was library faculty and staff, and we wanted broad, engaged participation, so the paper was intended to be easy to digest – we wanted everyone to read it without creating a significant time burden for folks. This work was meant to spark a longer conversation on organizing for open in our library, to lay out the arguments and raise questions, so we could develop understanding and (hopefully) generate buy-in for change. Additionally, the way that the work behind the paper and its projected use going forward were designed created lines of communication across library departments.

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Our working definition of Open Scholarship is “that which enables the broadest possible distribution and use of scholarly work by reducing and removing barriers to sharing, accessing, and distributing scholarly information.”

From Open-ing the Library, 2023

CK

For this section, I’ll dive in on some of the foundational issues we addressed in the paper, starting with “what are we talking about when we say ‘Open.’” The idea of “open” can mean different things from different perspectives. It was important to agree on a definition as we started researching and writing, before we could move forward on building consensus around the idea. For our purposes, Open Scholarship is “that which enables the broadest possible distribution and use of scholarly work by reducing and removing barriers to sharing, accessing, and distributing scholarly information.”

It is meant to be an inclusive definition, applying widely to anything that could be considered scholarly information. We can use this concept to talk about open access, open publishing, and open journals; as well as open data, open science, open educational resources, open pedagogy, open source software, and so on. We wanted to emphasize the removal of barriers over the form or format of the content. And barriers to distributing information have long been tied to privilege, whether due to cost, subscriptions, and restrictive licensing policies; or things like physical location, technical limitations, or lack of accessibility accommodations.

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How do we position the Library, whose primary mission is to unlock access to content, in a world where content is already open?

Collections
Discovery
Metadata
Outreach
Teaching
Licensing
Versioning
Crediting
Evaluation

CK

Libraries have long been working to reduce these kinds of barriers for our communities; it’s central to what we do. The “problem space” that we are facing now is one of relevance. As the greater scholarly publishing landscape is becoming increasingly open, paywalls and subscription models are in decline, and more and more high quality content is freely and easily accessible. Our interest at OSU Libraries is in continuing to provide vital services to our community, as this part of our traditional mission where we unlock access to content becomes less essential. This question, “how to position the library in a world of open content” – it affects nearly everything we do.

The white paper was written not to answer this question, but to make the case that the question deserves to be asked, and start to outline some strategies for tackling it.

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White Paper Overview

Current trends in scholarly publishing
Predictions about the Library’s evolving role
Internal and external interviews
Considerations and prompts for specific departments and services
History of OA at OSU + further reading

CK

As an overview of the white paper process: We started by describing the changing scholarly communication landscape, in which nearly half of scholarly articles are now open access; OA publishing is described in various color categories; and publishers are adopting new profit models that shift from pay-to-read into pay-to-publish. At the same time, US government mandates are expanding requirements for public access to the outputs from federally funded research, which adds pressure for increasingly opening publishing systems.

We made some predictions about the role of the library as these trends continue, to support a big-picture view of where we expect the needs to be. We conducted interviews with several OSULP staff members and with external institutions to help identify specific service and staffing areas where change may be needed. With those pieces as the foundation of the argument for change, we presented a summary of considerations and a list of prompts for different functional areas of the library; as well as for organizational structure and staffing. Finally, the paper provides appendices that cover historical support for open initiatives at OSU and resources for further reading.

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Prediction 1

The Library’s role as a bridge between users and resources will continue.

We still have a part to play in making these connections…

But how we do this needs to evolve.

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Library Services

Users

Resources

From Open-ing the Library, 2023

CK

Following the idea of the library as a bridge for a moment, there are familiar structures here that we can build onto as we think about that original question of reorganizing around open. On the “users” side of the bridge, we provide our user community with the skills and tools to navigate the scholarly environment. On the “resources” side, we have the expertise to identify and collect high quality resources, and we add high quality description and organization so those resources can be discovered and understood. Then there is the the work we do to mediate or facilitate those connections – user services, robust and flexible systems, rights management, and ongoing evaluation and assessment.

Traditional library services have been established to bridge some pretty clearly defined obstacles, such as paywalls and database subscriptions. As scholarly communication moves in this open direction, the nature of those obstacles is changing, and continuing to provide a bridge may mean that instead we are working on things like making open resources more easily discoverable, making them more accessible to users, vetting resources to ensure they’re meeting user needs, and teaching evaluation skills so that our users can recognize which resources are more or less trustworthy.

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Prediction 2

The Library’s role in distributing locally created content will expand.

We can provide quality sharing platforms and help scholars navigate options.

CK

If the traditional core of librarianship is about collecting external resources and delivering them to our local user community, then this second prediction is about turning that model upside down. The predicted expansion of our role in sharing locally created content emphasizes the part that libraries can play in supporting the distribution of resources that are created by our local user community, helping our users to openly share their work. This isn’t a new idea either, but we expect to see this becoming more and more central to the library’s mission. For instance, our library can focus on providing platforms for sharing that supplement or even compete with those offered by for-profit publishers. We can also help to educate scholars in our communities about the publishing options that are available to them.

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Sparking Conversation

White paper not a comprehensive plan for change
While working group represented different areas of the library, wanted more input
Each department has its own needs and expertise in areas touched by open scholarship

CK

As I mentioned, the white paper served as a starting point for an organization-wide conversation. In other words, our charge was not to deliver a comprehensive plan for moving forward. While our working group represented different areas of the library, and we did talk to internal staff in other departments, there were some gaps in our makeup - namely that we were all tenure track faculty, with no classified staff or non-tenure track academic or professional faculty members, and no administrators. It was not incumbent upon the paper-writing group to dictate the goals and outcomes across the library. Each department has its own needs and expertise in areas touched by open scholarship. From the outset, additional conversations were planned, bringing in the rest of the organization. To that end, the paper includes sets of prompts to guide our broader discussions.

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Prompt Overview

Prompts had both common themes…

Staffing, resources, policies, and communication

But also some individual issues

How do we expand support for existing open content?
How do we meet new federal requirements?
How do we expand pedagogical support?

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Read the white paper:

https://tinyurl.com/osu-open

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What are the impacts?

How will the change be felt across the organization?

What strengths do we have in this area?

What gaps do we need to fill?

DC

When the white paper was done, it was time to use it as a discussion starter. Department heads shared the paper, and framing questions: 1) Do you buy the premise? 2) What does this mean for your (individual) work, We also used are annual library-wide inservice day to provide an additional space for input. We used jamboard for remote employees over the next week.

I think it’s important to note that this phase – the discussion phase – wasn’t wholly separate from the rest of the story. The discussions about impacts, opportunities and costs both helped create buy-in for the need to change and also surfaced questions that would act as a transition to the next part – what are we going to do about it?

So for impacts, we are interested in how the organization and the people in it will experience this change. Responses in this area feel into two areas – one was the ways this change would build on or align with strengths we already felt we had. The other was to talk about gaps that would need to be addressed.

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Strengths

Gaps

Discovery infrastructure

User input loop

Licensing/ contract law

Digital preservation

Digital collection maintenance

Privacy/ user data

Open source

Repository

Values alignment - open

Values alignment - privacy

Metadata expertise

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What is the cost of doing nothing?

What do we risk if we do not do this?

What do we gain if we do?

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Risks

Gains

Equity

Access

Discoverability – for OSU

Better discoverability infrastructure – our metadata lives in a shared environment

Sustainability

Irrelevance

Greater inequity

Further capitalization of research

Diminished research impact for OSU

Not doing this is NOT an option

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Thank you for the excellent conversation today, but most of all, thank you for having a CONVERSATION.

Talking about the future of scholcomm is important, but thinking about our structures is really how we get in front of the curve.

The question to us is, do you buy this premise, is this work we need to do? and the answer I came out of reading it with was, YES, this is hopeful, joyous, proactive future building. I'm really glad to be at a place with such eyes/talent/forward focus.

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Next questions

Change won’t happen overnight – how do we help researchers right now and going forward?

There are ways to move towards open that are more problematic than others - where should we be investing in open?

What is our role? What is our lane, and where do we need to collaborate with others?

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Where are we now, and what’s next?

Where does our library currently stand?
What are some changes we can make in the short term?
What are some changes that will require more time and investment?

CK

Rounding us out here: We at OSU Libraries are thinking about Open and working intentionally toward change. This isn’t a project that we’ve completed; it’s a reflective process where we assess, where are we now, and what do we do next? – And we encourage the audience to think about these questions at your libraries, too. We took the initial steps of creating and sharing the white paper, to make the case and check receptivity. We were met with strong support to move the conversation forward and to carry those ideas into wider planning efforts with Open as a major theme.

Before this focused conversation began, some initiatives were already underway, especially disinvesting from subscriptions and moving toward on-demand services. The attention brought to open scholarship issues has sparked new initiatives as well. For instance, our Research and Learning department is working on promoting pedagogical support; and in our institutional repository, we are trying to increase Green OA deposits of scholarly works. We filled many of our open positions; we named an interim head of our resource sharing department who will be focused on strategies for open; and we were able to redesignate several cataloging and metadata positions to provide for more growth potential and more appropriate compensation given the complexity of that work. As we bring new people on board, we are communicating to folks that change should be expected, that the work they are being hired for now may not be the work they are doing in five years. The changes requiring more time and investment, we have moved toward incorporating into strategic planning in our organization.

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Strategic Action Plan

CK

OSU put out its campus-wide strategic plan in 2023, emphasizing interdisciplinary, collaborative research and the impact of the university's research across our state. Throughout 2024, our library has worked together in developing our Strategic Action Plan to support the campus plan, to guide our library’s work over the next couple of years. While this has not been anything like a top to bottom reorganization, the conversations about Open were strongly reflected during this process.

Early this year small groups worked on brainstorming goals and actions for the library. After that phase, we held the “gallery walk” activity shown in these photos, where library staff responded to these ideas using color-coded dots to indicate their reactions and anticipated impact. The image on the right shows a poster for “Opening Up Collections,” where we see a lot of dots, especially red dots, indicating that folks were engaging with this theme and specific idea within it, but recognized that the proposed actions would need new resources to achieve.

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Strategic Plan: Centering Open

Goal 1

“Knowing that our communities find resources in many places, we develop collections and build systems and services to ensure that they get seamless access to the things they want. […] We work to remove the barriers that prevent researchers from publishing where and when they want to, and to raise the visibility and impact of the important work OSU researchers do.”

Strategy 1.3c: “Examine OSULP’s organizational structure, including staffing and resource allocation, to ensure that we have the flexibility needed to navigate a scholarly communication landscape that is becoming increasingly more open.”

CK

The plan was refined by library administration based on the collaborative input, and it was approved in September (and should be posted to our library website soon). We can see ideas related to Open brought into the plan in many areas, but Open is plainly stated in several places. Tying to OSU’s goal of focusing on “big discoveries that drive big solutions,” our work plan for the next couple of years highlights the library’s role to, quote, “Develop collections and build systems and services to ensure that [our communities] get seamless access to the things they want,” and to “Work to remove the barriers that prevent researchers from publishing where and when they want to, and to raise the visibility and impact of the important work OSU researchers do.” This is very reminiscent of the white paper’s central predictions, that the library will continue to bring users and resources together, and that we will increase our support for the dissemination of OSU scholarship.

Actions under this goal tie specifically to open, and one strategy specifically shows that this work will continue – that we will, quote, “Examine OSULP’s organizational structure, including staffing and resource allocation, to ensure that we have the flexibility needed to navigate a scholarly communication landscape that is becoming increasingly more open.” In other words, for OSU libraries, we have laid the groundwork and established that change is necessary, and we’ve done some key work to bring our organization on board – but there is a lot more work ahead.

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Thank you!

Diana.Castillo@oregonstate.edu

Cara.Key@oregonstate.edu