Big Ten Academic Alliance launches library publishing pilot

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) has announced 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.

Through this BTAA-funded initiative, Penn State University Libraries and Indiana University Libraries will work with the NGLP team to implement the Meru display layer, enhancing infrastructure and service models specifically for the BTAA. The project will involve migrating select content from the partners' catalogs into the NGLP ecosystem, improving interface design, and expanding the types of content displayed. The goal is to support and strengthen academy-owned scholarly publishers with scalable solutions.

Aligned with a recent IMLS grant-funded project, the University of Iowa Libraries are collaborating with the NGLP team to build a production-ready instance of Meru, showcasing their full publication portfolio. All three institutions aim to explore consortial approaches to campus-based publishing, achieving economies of scale, increasing the visibility and impact of members’ publications, and advancing infrastructure for Diamond Open Access publishing.

This effort is part of a broader initiative by the BTAA, California Digital Library, and Lyrasis to promote Diamond Open Access publishing in the U.S. These organizations recognise the importance of pooling efforts to realise the potential of Diamond OA, which supports no-fee scholarly publishing opportunities and ensures open access to academic research.

Kate McCready, visiting program officer for academy-owned scholarly publishing at the BTAA, said: “The BTAA’s Center for Library Programs is dedicated to exploring Diamond Open Access publishing solutions that enhance production quality and create efficiencies at scale for our campuses.”

The Big Ten Academic Alliance continues to advocate for a sustainable and open publication ecosystem. Collectively, faculty and researchers at BTAA member universities publish over 100,000 articles annually, supported by over $17 billion in research funding. These institutions are investing significantly in advancing public knowledge through open publishing, producing over 15% of the U.S. research publications. Strengthening collective publishing capacity is essential to the BTAA Libraries' mission of promoting open and equitable scholarly publishing models.