Open research as a strategic priority: Insights from an OCLC RLP leadership roundtable

This post is one in a series documenting findings from the RLP Leadership Roundtable discussions.

Open research, also widely referred to as open science or open scholarship, encompasses best practices, policies, and support enabling greater openness, transparency, and accountability throughout the research life cycle. Open research is increasingly a strategic priority for libraries and their parent institutions, often driven by institutional and national policies. For libraries, open research includes support for open access publishing, research data management, data sharing, and more.

The OCLC Research Library Partnership (RLP) convened the Research Support Leadership Roundtable in March 2025 to discuss open research as a strategic priority. The roundtable discussions brought together 50 library leaders from 33 institutions across four countries, who shared their experiences, strategies, and concerns related to the implementation and support of open research.

Aston University	Stony Brook University	University of Maryland
British Library	Syracuse University	University of Miami
Carnegie Mellon University	Temple University	University of Nevada, Reno
Clemson University	Tufts University	University of Oxford
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory	University of Arizona	University of Southern California
Colorado State University	University of Calgary	University of Tennessee, Knoxville
London School of Economics & Political Science	University of California, Irvine	University of Texas at Austin
Monash University	University of California, Riverside	University of Waterloo
New York University	University of California, San Diego	Virginia Tech
Ohio State University	University of Glasgow	Yale University
Penn State	University of Illinois Urbana Champaign
Rutgers University	University of Manchester

Our conversations focused on open research as a strategic priority, and participants were asked to consider these framing questions:

1. Is open research a cohesive institutional and/or library strategic priority, and is the institution/library tracking progress toward open research goals? If so, how?
2. How is open research being implemented at your institution? That is, is it a centralized effort coordinated by the library (or another unit) or is it highly distributed? How are stakeholders collaborating?
3. How are external factors impacting your institution’s open research goals and activities? This might include things like cybersecurity, national security, scrutiny of international collaborations, reputation and prestige, AI, etc.

This post offers a synthesis of our discussions. RLP leadership roundtables observe the Chatham House Rule; no specific comments are attributed to any individual or institution.

Open research as a strategic priority 

The roundtable discussion revealed a spectrum of institutional practices related to open research strategy, ranging from:

• Explicit incorporation into institution-level strategic plans
• Inclusion in library strategic plans
• No articulated strategy related to open research, despite significant activities

The absence of a central strategic priority statement about open research at either the campus or library level does not necessarily indicate a lack of support for open research. All participating libraries demonstrated leadership on open scholarship topics, often despite what one participant characterized as a “pretty lukewarm” campus response.

Approximately seven institutions participating in the roundtable reported that open research was an institution-level priority. One US institution with ambitious research productivity goals is investing in research support infrastructure, including an open scholarship unit within the library. UK institutions were generally more likely to make open research an institution-wide priority, influenced by national policies and priorities. In these cases, institutional prioritization typically results in greater centralization and coordination of the open research service bundle, usually housed within the library.

At least eight RLP institutions reported that open research is a stated strategic priority for the library, with open research explicitly called out in research strategic plans. At many other libraries, the commitment to open research remains largely tacit, demonstrated through array of services rather than explicit statements.

Library support for open research

Our discussions also revealed that the bundling of open research services exists across a spectrum. An institutional-level commitment to open research typically indicates greater coordination under a single operational umbrella. For instance, I have previously written about the library-based Office of Open Research at the University of Manchester, which represents a new level of commitment, maturity, and coordination of open research activities for the university.

Libraries play a central role in advancing open research, though service offerings vary between institutions and may not be marketed to the university community as a comprehensive package.

Open publishing

For example, most institutions provide support for open access publishing, usually through a multimodal approach that could include:

• Institutional repositories (IRs) that facilitate the deposit and discovery of publications, data, and other scholarly works.
• Open access publishing funds that cover Article Processing Charges (APCs) for publication in hybrid journals for affiliated researchers.
• Transformative/Read and Publish Agreements (TAs) shift library payments from subscription-based reading to open access publishing. These agreements are negotiated with each publisher and can be administratively burdensome.
• Library publishing programs that host open access journals and support innovation with new publication formats. Furthermore, approximately half of US university presses also now report to the library, further extending and integrating library publishing efforts.

Open research services and expertise

Libraries may support other open research services (such as the ones listed below), although few institutions in our roundtable reported supporting all four.

• Research data management service offerings have become quite expansive at some institutions, including curating and preserving research data, facilitating compliance with funder mandates, and promotion of FAIR data principles. Many libraries now offer infrastructure for data storage and sharing, often through the establishment of a local data repository or facilitated access to an external repository like Dryad.
• Scholarly communications consultations offer guidance on OA policies, funder mandates, author rights and copyright, licensing, and data sharing. Many participants reported that their libraries were increasing their outreach to researchers related to rights retention statements, particularly in light of funder mandates requiring authors to retain rights.
• Research impact metrics to assess factors like data reuse, open access publications, and the broader impact of open research is an emerging area of interest in some libraries.
• Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a growing priority for many libraries, in alignment with institutional goals to support textbook affordability, equity, and student success. Some libraries now offer platforms as well as expert guidance to support OER creation, occasionally with funding to incentivize OER development and adoption by faculty.

Library-provisioned infrastructure

Furthermore, libraries have invested significant resources in infrastructures necessary to support open research, particularly:

• Institutional repositories (IRs)
• Data repositories
• Data Management Planning (DMP) platforms like the DMPTool (US and Australia), DMPAssistant (Canada), and DMPonline (UK)
• Open journal and monograph publishing platforms
• Research information management systems (RIMS/CRIS) may also be used for tracking and reporting on OA goals

Library support for open research is nested within the broader institutional research enterprise. Despite significant library leadership, services, and infrastructure investments, campus awareness of library contributions to open research may be limited. For example, at one RLP institution, the Office of Research independently launched a new open science initiative, with no recognition of library expertise, services, or infrastructure. However, the initiative requires multi-stakeholder engagement, and the library now provides much of the programing for the effort. Collaboration on such a multi-faceted effort faced ongoing challenges due to persistent leadership turnover, decentralization, resource scarcity, and competing organizational priorities.

Factors shaping open research

Roundtable participants described many conditions that are shaping open research, both positively and negatively:

• Mandates are a key driver of open research, with significant regional differences. For example, the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) includes an open access mandate, and compliance directly impacts institutional research funding. This, together with open research mandates from UKRI (the primary government research funder), is driving institution-level commitments to open research. In the US, increased data sharing stems primarily from funder mandates rather than research initiative.
• Researcher engagement remains low across many institutions, with low researcher interest in open publishing, particularly through green OA. Faculty promotion and tenure criteria rarely reward open research practices, while the need to publish in prestigious journals continues to drive faculty publishing decisions.
• Misconceptions about research security create hesitancy toward open research, a concern that grows as more institutions experience cyberattacks. More than one roundtable participant described how articulating the principle of “as open as possible, as closed as necessary,” can address concerns.   
• Resource constraints present universal challenges to open access publishing. The rising costs of transformative agreements strain budgets. While many institutions have entered into transformative agreements (also referred to as read and publish or publish and read agreements) with publishers, questions about their effectiveness in transitioning to a fully open ecosystem are arising, particularly in the UK. Many small- to mid-size libraries may often lack the resources to participate in these agreements. Furthermore, many institutions offer minimal or no central APC subvention funds, and those that do support APCs find this popular resource quickly depleted, raising sustainability concerns.
• Fragmented services hinder researcher access to resources.Several participants described efforts to bundle and scale services, such as through centralized research support web portals, library reorganization, and improved social interoperability among campus stakeholders. I have previously blogged about the creation of a research support hub at Montana State University, which simplifies research access to services.

GenAI implications for open research

Roundtable participants discussed both the challenges and opportunities generative AI presents for research. The widespread use of scholarly content, particularly OA content, in large language models (LLMs), coupled with ongoing uncertainties about fair use, copyright, and data ownership is raising concerns among researchers. Many are becoming hesitant to share their work openly, fearing its use in AI training datasets. This uncertainty is slowing adoption of open research in some locales and creating education and outreach challenges for libraries. Additionally, a few participants described how the rapid accessing and downloading of repository content by AI bots and agents is straining repository infrastructure. This challenge is so disruptive that at least one institution is considering restricting machine access to digital resources—counter to open principles—to maintain platform stability.

A few library leaders expressed an interest in GenAI and research impact analysis. For instance, a few libraries are exploring new ways to assess open research adoption by tracking data and software availability statements. Other are interested in the tracking of outputs related to AI, and some institutions are beginning to track AI-related publications as part of research impact metrics. An outstanding challenge, however, is an elusive definition of “AI” for metric purposes, due to the fragmented nature of the field, which includes robotics, machine learning, and machine vision.

Despite the challenges, participants were optimistic about GenAI’s potential to enhance open research, and several institutions are actively exploring ways to integrate AI into their infrastructure. For example, one institution is hoping to use more AI tools to enrich repository content, potentially involving structured XML representations and enhanced content like video abstracts. Another is focusing on helping researchers apply careful data curation approaches to building machine learning models. Additionally, multiple RLP institutions report hiring AI research librarians and data scientists to expand research support services and offer AI literacy to campus populations.

Conclusion

Libraries have invested heavily in open research and have the opportunity to play an important leadership role. However, the provision of research support services remains loosely organized at most institutions, congruent with the absence of strong institutional prioritization of open research. Where open research is a strategic priority, services tend to be more centralized and coordinated within the library—a trend likely to accelerate with increasing open research mandates.

AI Nota Bene: I used this blog post as an opportunity to experiment with and learn how AI tools can support writing. I specifically leveraged WebEx AI-generated summaries and transcripts, Google NotebookLM, and Claude, along with some more limited experiments with Copilot and ChatGPT. I used NotebookLM to help me identify key themes from my own notes and discussion transcripts, in conjunction with relevant external sources I selected. This was useful as I developed an outline for the blog post. While I did adapt some suggested language from NotebookLM, I did the majority of the writing myself, as I still found this necessary for including relevant details as well as maintaining my authorial voice. I found Claude to be useful as an editor and proofreader of a near-final draft, as I prompted it to recommend ways I could improve clarity and conciseness. I incorporated many, but not all, of Claude’s suggestions.