RLUK Executive Director, David Prosser, participated in a panel discussion at the 2021 Liber Conference, on How libraries and consortia can support the OA transitions of not-for-profit publishers, and why. A recording of this session can be viewed below.

Transformative OA agreements repurpose former subscription funds to support open access publishing, enabling more research to be published openly. How can open access and open science be advanced further? This session provides important insights into future directions and opportunities for further collaboration between libraries, funders, and not-for-profit publishers, and highlights the most effective models for driving compliance, cost restraint, diversity, and open access.

This panel shares ideas for how libraries and consortia can engage effectively with this long tail of publishers while juggling the priority attention required by Covid 19 driven changes to the economy. The long tail of publishers is very, very long indeed and no library has time and resources to manage this by themselves even in the best economy. There are ways to overcome challenges and realise opportunities, for example in the way these agreements are entered into, funded, operationalised, and scaled internationally, so as to minimise administration and reapportion and rebalance costs between countries and institutions.