4 University Library’s Budgeting for Open Access Scholarship
Jill Emery
In the fiscal year 2024-2025, the general collections budget for the University Library is $3,952,841. This funding is further subdivided up between electronic resources which can be databases, data sets, journal packages, journal subscriptions, one time purchased ebooks & streaming media and the purchase of physical materials which are generally DVDs, newspapers, print magazines & journals, and print books. For this fiscal year, PSU Library dedicates $1,013,756 of our overall budget towards open access models to support scholarship development on campus. This means we spend just under a third of the overall Library’s budget for general collections toward open access initiatives.
In 2017, David Lewis, Dean of the IUPUI University Library, issued a call for commitment to academic libraries asking them to commit 2.5% of their overall budget “to support the common infrastructure needed to create the open scholarly commons.” Through the work we have done with our information resource management council and the work occurring from our Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Publishing unit, we well exceed this goal. Lewis argues that by making this commitment, academic communities and academic libraries stand a much better chance of growing and developing a new model of an open scholarly commons.
At the same time, University librarians recognize the disparities and concerns raised about solely supporting article publishing charges (APCs) enacted by legacy scholarly publishers in journals to which the University Library continues to pay subscriptions. These journals which are funded by both APCs and subscriptions are called hybrid journals. We’ve chosen to support paying APCs associated mostly with fully open access journals and open access initiatives coming from academic societies, scholarly community driven projects, small academic presses, and university presses. The two major commercial scholarly publishers the University Library supports are due to high demand from faculty on campus.
In the following chapters, we will outline both the budget allotted for each of these models and the providers we are currently working with to provide OA publishing opportunities to the Portland State University campus.
