News

News

  • Big Ten Academic Alliance and Springer Nature Announce First-Ever Unlimited Open Access Publishing Agreement in the Americas

    May 29, 2025, 00:00 AM

    On May 29, 2025, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and Springer Nature announced a groundbreaking two-year Open Publishing Agreement; the first of its kind in the Americas to offer truly unlimited and uncapped open access publishing in Springer’s hybrid journals. Key highlights: - No fees, no caps, no limits: Faculty, students, and staff at participating BTAA institutions can publish open access articles without paying article processing charges (APCs). - Simplified publishing: Authors retain rights to their work, which is published under a Creative Commons license and made immediately accessible. - Expanded access: All participating campuses gain full read access to over 2,200 Springer hybrid journals, including titles from Springer, Palgrave Macmillan, Adis, and nature.com. - Operational efficiency: The agreement eliminates administrative overhead by centralizing payments and streamlining workflows. - Participating institutions include 14 major research universities such as the University of Michigan, University of Illinois, and University of Wisconsin, with more eligible to join. This agreement reflects a shared commitment to open science, increased research visibility, and equitable access to scholarly publishing.

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  • Big Ten Excellence in Global Engagement: Penn State and Illinois Recognized with 2025 Simon Awards

    Feb 26, 2025, 14:05 PM

    The Big Ten Academic Alliance congratulates the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and the University of Illinois (Illinois) at Urbana-Champaign College of Education on receiving the 2025 Senator Paul Simon Awards for Campus Internationalization, presented by NAFSA: Association of International Educators. These prestigious awards underscore the universities’ remarkable dedication to global learning and the transformative ways they are shaping higher education.

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  • CourseShare at 20: How the Big Ten Is Transforming Language Education

    Feb 25, 2025, 09:50 AM

    For more than 20 years, the Big Ten Academic Alliance has been connecting students across its member institutions with instruction for “less-commonly taught languages” or LCTLs through its CourseShare program. While individual institutions may have difficulty providing multiple LCTLs to their students, the collaborative efforts of the Big Ten Academic Alliance allow students across the member universities to access instruction.

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  • Big Ten Academic Alliance Renews Support for MIT Press’s Direct to Open, Driving Open Access to 80 New Monographs in 2025

    Jan 16, 2025, 11:53 AM

    The Big Ten Academic Alliance proudly announces its renewed three-year commitment to the MIT Press’s Direct to Open (D2O) program. This innovative initiative, which has successfully reached its funding goal for 2025, will open access to 80 new scholarly monographs and edited collections, further advancing the global public knowledge commons.

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  • 10 Years Later: Dr. Brian Burt’s Mission to Transform STEM Pathways for Black Males

    Dec 20, 2024, 15:08 PM

    In 2014, the Big Ten Academic Alliance highlighted Dr. Brian Burt, then an emerging scholar. Now, a decade later, we reconnect with Dr. Burt, now a Full Professor and Director of Wisconsin's Equity & Inclusion Lab (Wei LAB) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to explore how his early experiences have shaped his current work. His commitment to supporting Black males in STEM has culminated in the groundbreaking Black Males in Engineering (BME) project, aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of Black males in STEM fields.

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  • Announcing the 2024-2025 Big Ten Academic Alliance Academic Leadership Program Fellows

    Nov 18, 2024, 11:22 AM

    The Big Ten Academic Alliance is pleased to announce the 2024-2025 Academic Leadership Program (ALP) Fellows. This year’s ALP Fellows, representing the program’s 37th cohort, join over 2,000 alumni. Many of those alumni have gone on to serve with distinction as college presidents, provosts, and deans.

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  • Big Ten Academic Alliance Procurement Consortium: A Strategic Force for Innovation and Collaboration

    Oct 21, 2024, 13:42 PM

    The Big Ten Academic Alliance Procurement Consortium is transforming how universities manage purchasing and procurement. By harnessing the collective strength of these world-class universities, the consortium delivers strategic benefits that drive cost savings, foster innovation, and promote inclusivity across campuses.

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  • The Big Ten Academic Alliance and Smithsonian Institution Celebrate Prestigious Fellowship Program

    Oct 7, 2024, 14:25 PM

    The Big Ten Academic Alliance is proud to announce the 2024 recipients of the prestigious Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellowship. Since its inception in 2012, the fellowship program has awarded 83 fellowships to exceptional doctoral candidates across various disciplines, fostering academic excellence and promoting diversity.

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  • Big Ten Academic Alliance Groups Mobilize to Further Digital Accessibility

    Aug 5, 2024, 12:10 PM

    Preparing to respond to the new Title II accessibility regulations, several peer communities banded together to form Big Ten Academic Alliance Accessibility Collaboration. Partnering across the consortium are the IT Accessibility Group, ADA Coordinators, Learning Technology Leaders, the Library Accessibility Group, and others.

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  • Big Ten Academic Alliance Welcomes UCLA, USC, Oregon and Washington

    Aug 2, 2024, 11:02 AM

    The Big Ten Academic Alliance is excited to welcome the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Southern California (USC), the University of Oregon, and the University of Washington into the nation's premier consortium of leading research universities. For over 65 years, the world-class institutions of the Big Ten 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.

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  • Big Ten Academic Alliance Leadership Institute Shapes Future Leaders in Higher Education

    Jul 30, 2024, 10:08 AM

    The Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Group of the Big Ten Academic Alliance is much more than the cherished peer network of the individuals who lead faculty affairs and development offices across the Big Ten universities. The VPFA Group also creates and delivers the Alliance’s highly regarded and often-emulated portfolio of academic leadership programs.

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  • Big Ten Academic Alliance + Next Generation Library Publishing Announce the Launch of a Pilot Project

    Jul 24, 2024, 09:51 AM

    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.

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  • Unlocking Opportunities: Big Ten Academic Alliance Admissions Webinars for Prospective Students

    Jul 23, 2024, 13:37 PM

    Since 2020, Admissions Directors from the prestigious Big Ten universities have joined forces to engage with over 20,000 potential students through a series of dynamic online events. These webinars, hosted by the Big Ten Academic Alliance, provide a unique opportunity for aspiring college students to explore the benefits of attending a Big Ten institution.

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  • Big Ten Academic Alliance libraries are now live with OCLC Resource Sharing for Groups

    Jun 17, 2024, 11:28 AM

    OCLC is partnering with the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) to advance development of OCLC Resource Sharing for Groups, a new solution that reimagines resource sharing with a focus on library groups and consortia. OCLC and the BTAA are working together to support the evolution of BTAA's UBorrow service, which offers access to more than 90 million books from the collections of 15 university libraries and the Center for Research Libraries, as part of OCLC's Resource Sharing for Groups.

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  • Big Ten Academic Alliance libraries and Coherent Digital expand coverage of the Global South

    May 1, 2024, 14:44 PM

    Today, the libraries of Big Ten Academic Alliance confirmed the purchase of three additional modules of Africa Commons, a large-scale, multiyear project to digitize, disseminate, and discover African cultural materials, building on their 2022 founding-member purchase of the first module, African History and Culture. In addition, the Big Ten Academic Alliance has been named a founding member of South Asia Commons.

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  • Better together: BTAA Libraries, CDL and Lyrasis commit to strengthen Diamond Open Access in the United States

    Apr 18, 2024, 10:59 AM

    Representatives from the Big Ten Academic Alliance Libraries (BTAA Libraries), California Digital Library (CDL) and Lyrasis attended the Global Summit on Diamond Open Access in Toluca, Mexico in October 2023. The Summit convened the international community to engage in dialog about how to advance Diamond Open Access(OA) to secure scholarly research as a public good and ensure equitable access to both the publishing and reading of that research.

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  • Empowering You Conference Elevates Professional Growth Across the Big Ten Academic Alliance

    Mar 8, 2024, 12:37 PM

    In a resounding success, the Empowering You conference, designed to inspire personal and professional development, brought together over 150 enthusiastic participants from all corners of the country. The event, spanning a dynamic two hours, featured engaging presentations, collaborative activities, and a transformative session led by a panel of esteemed colleagues from across the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

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  • The Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Biochemical Society Sign Read & Publish Agreement in Support of Open Access Publishing

    Nov 8, 2023, 09:00 AM

    The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and the Biochemical Society are delighted to announce a Read & Publish agreement that supports the open sharing of research and knowledge from across the molecular biosciences.

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  • Increasing Access:  BTAA Libraries Project on Open Homework Systems

    Sep 20, 2023, 10:33 AM

    Penn State University Libraries is leading a pilot project on behalf of the Big Ten Academic Alliance to develop a model for supporting open-source online homework delivery systems as supplemental resources for teaching with open educational resources (OER).

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  • Big Ten Open Books Project Launches First Collection

    Aug 1, 2023, 09:00 AM

    In partnership with six member university presses, the University Librarians of the Big Ten Academic Alliance announce the launch of the Big Ten Open Books project, a collaboration between the university presses and libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance.

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