Open Scholarship Strategy

Open Scholarship Strategy

The libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance are partnering to aid in transforming academic publishing to expand public knowledge for the public good. Our goal is to help advance the growth of open knowledge with a particular focus on open, more equitable scholarship. 

The Big Ten Open Scholarship Strategies

We are partnering with the many people and organizations working in this space to help build a sustainable, scalable, trustworthy, and just open knowledge ecosystem. 

Our work is structured within seven strategies that directly address challenges that prevent scholarship from becoming openly available. Each strategy is inspired by a key challenge we are bringing attention to for collective action.


Balancing/transforming the journals marketplace

Key challenge: Prohibitive unsustainable inflation and the high cost of research outputs

Our strategic focus: Negotiating open publishing agreements

Current activity: Through its licensing work, the BTAA is shifting its licensing portfolio from “buying club” to “open”. We have put in place open publishing agreements with Cambridge University Press; Wiley & Sons; and the Institute of Physics.

Data analysis and research

Key challenge: Fractured data landscape and high cost of analysis.

Our strategic focus: Data dashboards and related tools that can be used for researching and visualizing the landscape at scale

Current activity: Working with the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), we have developed a functional beta of an Open Access Dashboard to give insights into publishing activity across all member institutions and progress toward OA

Being an early partner in helping to launch the Invest in Open Infrastructure Initiative (IOI), particularly its open infrastructure and investment research

Elevating marginalized and unheard voices

Key challenge: Voices of advantage - Re-examining what we collect and why.

Our strategic focus: Digital publishing and purchasing

Current activity: The Big Ten Open Ebook pilot project is opening access to published works on diverse, often marginalized topics with a focus on authors from diverse backgrounds.   

In 2022, six BTAA institutions invested in a customized DEI monograph collection as part of a pilot program with ProQuest.

All libraries of the consortium joined together to co-invest in Reveal Digital’s effort to build the “Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movement”

Opening the scholarly monograph

Key challenge: Arbitrary pricing, access, and availability.

Our strategic focus: University-based publishing

Current activity: Building a 100-title, open access, pilot collection on the topic of Gender and Sexuality Studies from the backlist of 6 Big Ten university presses. 

Investing collectively in the Direct to Open (D2O) model from MIT Press and the Fund to Mission model from the University of Michigan Press

Strengthening academy repository infrastructure

Key challenge: Inconsistency, and poorly integrated.

Our strategic focus: Advancing standards and infrastructure services for interoperable systems and workflows

Current activity: Conducting a landscape assessment of policies and practices to identify opportunities for collective action.

Jointly invested in as a consortium in arXiv to raise the level of our collective support and invest in strengthening this crucial piece of academy publishing infrastructure

Research data

Key challenge: open data and data publishing (disconnected from publishing, reproducibility)

Our strategic focus: Open data publishing

Current activity: Exploring investments in systems that support access to, and preservation of, research data.
Building a portfolio of sustainable open content & open infrastructure

Key challenge: Closed commercialized infrastructure and content.

Our strategic focus: Exploring and supporting the development of sustainable business models and governance

Current activity: We have made collective investments in a number of organizations and projects that are either building or supporting open infrastructure and open content and experimenting with different business models and governance models to achieve that. Some of our investments include the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and OAPEN, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Library of of the Humanities (OLH), OA Switchboard, and the OACIP initiative from Lyrasis.

We are conducting a landscape assessment of scholarly publishing activity at our universities to identify opportunities for collective action.