Is Open Access Really "Better"? A Library-Publisher-Vendor Conversation on Assessing OA Publishing Value from the Library Perspective

Communicating the impact of Open Access (OA) publishing is critical for long term funding support, and yet the industry lacks best practices in this area. Although COUNTER standards are slowly evolving to address OA use cases, they are designed to support library investment decisions in paid content and don’t effectively communicate the impact of OA investments to key institutional stakeholders, authors or funding agencies. There are also important privacy concerns to address in tracking individual and institutional usage of OA information resources. With over 30% of scholarly articles in 2020 published as paid-for Open Access (OA), new solutions are being developed to meet this emerging need. This session explores how measuring and communicating impact will change in future from three different perspectives: OA publishers; the institutions generating, funding and consuming OA research; and emerging technical solutions. It will present the results of an extensive series of in-depth interviews with OA stakeholders to understand their needs, as well as feedback on the effectiveness of emerging solutions.