Atlanta, GA – June 18, 2020 – LYRASIS announces the release of a new study, “Understanding the Landscape of Open Content Activities in United States Libraries.” The study was undertaken in an effort to better understand how LYRASIS members, and the wider U.S. community, interact with open content in the forms of open access scholarship, open data, and open educational resources. The study can be accessed on the LYRASIS website.
Authored by Hannah Rosen, Strategist for Research and Scholarly Communication, and Jill Grogg, Strategist for Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives, the study is based on a survey conducted in early 2020 as a mechanism to better understand how (primarily academic) libraries within the United States are financially supporting and advocating for open content both inside and outside their institutions. 
Key findings of the study include:

  • Across academic libraries, institutional repositories for OA scholarship are widely adopted regardless of institution size. However, libraries have limited sway over faculty participation in their IRs.  
  • The majority of American institutions do not financially support independent OA initiatives – the institutions that do financially support OA contribute to a variety of pricing models, with no one dominant trend.
  • Open data adoption and hosting is lower than other areas of open content; academic and public libraries are beginning to host different forms of data, but most are still more likely to advocate for data curation than performing the work itself.
  • The majority of academic libraries do not host or provide access to OERs in their repositories. Rather, they choose to support local or state level initiatives that organize and disseminate OERs.

Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives at LYRASIS, says of the report, “This study provides a much needed overview of open content activities within the United States across diverse institutions. We hope this report will help GLAM institutions increase advocacy for their own internal open content activities and share in the community work to build and support sustainable open content programs.”
The report and all survey materials, including original survey questions and anonymized responses, are accessible on the LYRASIS webpage.