BTAA Announces New Partnership and Pilot
Information Industry News
Champaign, IL | July 24, 2024
The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is excited to announce a partnership with the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project. This collaboration aims to test and enhance infrastructure solutions for academy-owned scholarly publishing programs that are open source, community-led, and rooted in academic values. The pilot project will create a unified discovery layer for the diverse publishing platforms of participating libraries, presenting them as a single, shared collection of open access materials.
Through this BTAA-funded initiative, Penn State University Libraries and Indiana University Libraries will work with the NGLP team to implement the Meru display layer, enhancing infrastructure and service models specifically for the BTAA. The project will involve migrating select content from the partners' catalogs into the NGLP ecosystem, improving interface design, and expanding the types of content displayed. The goal is to support and strengthen academy-owned scholarly publishers with scalable solutions.
Aligned with a recent IMLS grant-funded project, the University of Iowa Libraries are collaborating with the NGLP team to build a production-ready instance of Meru, showcasing their full publication portfolio. All three institutions aim to explore consortial approaches to campus-based publishing, achieving economies of scale, increasing the visibility and impact of members’ publications, and advancing infrastructure for Diamond Open Access publishing.
This effort is part of a broader initiative by the BTAA, California Digital Library, and Lyrasis to promote Diamond Open Access publishing in the U.S. These organizations recognize the importance of pooling efforts to realize the potential of Diamond OA, which supports no-fee scholarly publishing opportunities and ensures open access to academic research.
Kate McCready, visiting program officer for academy-owned scholarly publishing at the BTAA, states, “The BTAA’s Center for Library Programs is dedicated to exploring Diamond Open Access publishing solutions that enhance production quality and create efficiencies at scale for our campuses.”
The Big Ten Academic Alliance continues to advocate for a sustainable and open publication ecosystem. Collectively, faculty and researchers at BTAA member universities publish over 100,000 articles annually, supported by over $17 billion in research funding. These institutions are investing significantly in advancing public knowledge through open publishing, producing over 15% of the U.S. research publications. Strengthening collective publishing capacity is essential to the BTAA Libraries' mission of promoting open and equitable scholarly publishing models.
About These Organizations
About the Big Ten Academic Alliance
The Big Ten Academic Alliance is the nation’s preeminent model for effective collaboration among research universities. For more than half a century, these world-class institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources, and collaborating on innovative programs.
Governed and funded by the provosts of the universities, Big Ten Academic Alliance mandates are coordinated by a staff from its Champaign, Illinois headquarters.
On August 2, 2024, four new universities will be joining the fifteen world-class libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance: the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, the University of Oregon, and the University of Washington. Collaborations are already underway with the libraries of the current member universities: Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the University of Chicago.
About Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP)
Materials are digital, visual, audio, and print. Over 60,000 journals are offered electronically, and the libraries hold more than 10 million print volumes in 450 languages and 120,000 films in its Moving Image Archive. Indiana University’s librarians actively collect and conserve knowledge and are leaders in national conversations in areas such as diversity initiatives, digital preservation and associated technologies, the changing role of area studies librarianship, and integrating information literacy. In addition, the IU Libraries are the organizational home of Indiana Publishing, which brings together the work of the highly respected Indiana University Press with the IU Libraries’ open-access publishing initiatives.
IU Libraries actively participate in local, national, and international initiatives that will define collections and services of the future. Memberships include regional and national associations and consortia, including the Big Ten Academic Alliance Center for Library Initiatives, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and the Samvera community. IU Libraries is a founding member of HathiTrust, a shared digital repository.
About Indiana University Libraries
Materials are digital, visual, audio, and print. Over 60,000 journals are offered electronically, and the libraries hold more than 10 million print volumes in 450 languages and 120,000 films in its Moving Image Archive. Indiana University’s librarians actively collect and conserve knowledge and are leaders in national conversations in areas such as diversity initiatives, digital preservation and associated technologies, the changing role of area studies librarianship, and integrating information literacy. In addition, the IU Libraries are the organizational home of Indiana Publishing, which brings together the work of the highly respected Indiana University Press with the IU Libraries’ open-access publishing initiatives.
IU Libraries actively participate in local, national, and international initiatives that will define collections and services of the future. Memberships include regional and national associations and consortia, including the Big Ten Academic Alliance Center for Library Initiatives, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and the Samvera community. IU Libraries is a founding member of HathiTrust, a shared digital repository.
About Penn State University Libraries
Since 2003, the Association of Research Libraries' metrics consistently recognize Penn State University Libraries among the top 10 research libraries in North America. An academic unit with a dean and tenure-line librarians, the University Libraries aims to inspire intellectual discovery and learning and supports all residential and online students, faculty, staff, and Pennsylvania residents, reflecting the University’s land-grant mission. Library locations on all Penn State campuses operate interdependently as “one University Libraries, geographically dispersed” with extensive shared physical and digital collections to help students succeed in academic and research pursuits.