We invited Louise Otting, collection & license manager at TU Delft, to explore the intersection of open access books and collection development. Louise offers her unique perspective on the role of libraries in shaping open access book collections and ensuring sustainable access to scholarly content for the academic community.
Can you tell us a bit about your role at your institution and how it relates to facilitating open access to books?
I am the Collection & License Manager at the TU Delft Library. In this role, I negotiate with publishers for access to sources and publishing, manage the related budgets, and together with a small team, write the policies and criteria.
Part of the budget I manage is a dedicated OA fund, which includes a separate budget for publishing OA books. In 2024, I also created an Open Scholarly Communication Fund that supports a wide range of initiatives that have a positive impact on Open Science. This can include funding to create open infrastructure, a project from a diamond university press, etc. That means it can also fund initiatives related to publishing diamond OA books. Our own university press, TU Delft Open Publishing, recommends initiatives that fit the criteria and that they collaborate with.
How does your library approach aligning collection development with the institution’s goals around open access and scholarly communication?
We have a central budget and a small collection team that manages our collection development, our open access advisor is part of that team. We monitor where our authors publish and negotiate Read and Publish (R&P) deals with publishers not covered by our consortium.
For sources that do not have a publishing component, like databases, we aim to select the most open options. We are currently formulating guiding principles next to our criteria to evaluate our new acquisitions and existing deals. These principles focus more on public values and the openness of sources. Our research analytics colleagues play an important role in finding these open alternatives and advising us when they are mature enough to replace our commercial sources.
Our OA fund and Open Scholarly Communication funds fall under the central budget and if we are able to save on access to sources or publishing through gold OA, we relocate a large part of those savings into the Open Scholarly Communication fund.
What role do you play in supporting and promoting open access book publishing, and how does that influence decisions about what to include in the collection?
We actively engage with departments to discuss the publishing landscape and provide guidance, using these opportunities to promote our university press. We collaborate with our university press through posters, conferences, thematic talks and promotion. We also advocate in (inter)national conferences, discussions, consortium meetings and Library Advisory Boards. Additionally, we participate in some Subscribe to Open book collections and provide funds to support OA book publishing.
How do you balance support for traditional acquisition models with open and more equitable models?
Balancing these models is an ongoing process. While we strongly prefer open and equitable models, we also serve students and staff whose needs must be met. We are currently in talks with our Library MT and director to change our directive from making OA publishing as easy as possible, to advising and guiding to sustainable, equitable OA publishing. We are working on our principles for the library and hope these will be adopted by the whole of the university in the future.
Can you share an example of a successful initiative that helped integrate open access to books more fully into your collection strategy?
The funds are a good example. Within our OA fund, there is a dedicated budget for OA book publishing. Our diamond university press publishes OA books and is proactive in staying ahead of new developments.
Another more specific example is when the Delft Academic Press suddenly went bankrupt. Despite what the name suggests, it was not a university press. Our open access advisor, open textbook specialist, and I quickly collaborated to safeguard the titles that were relevant to our courses and university. Using the collection budget, I acquired the copyright for 29 books, while our advisor and specialist worked with authors to finalise contracts. Eventually we were able to make those titles openly available through TU Delft Open Publishing.
What advice would you give to other librarians who are looking to align their acquisition strategies with broader institutional commitments to openness and sustainable publishing?
Investigate capping gold OA publications from for-profit publishers and creating an Open Access and/or Open Scholarly Communication fund that also invests in diamond initiatives and open infrastructure. The caps helped us save part of our budget , which we then reinvested into the funds. It was very important to gain greater control and transparency over our spending and to see where we could redirect resources to initiatives that genuinely advance open science and support a healthier publishing landscape.
