In their words: The biggest challenges higher ed libraries face to advancing OER 
Next month, we will publish a report on the results of a first-of-its-kind survey intended to glean insights into the current Open Education (OE) landscape within Higher Education libraries in Europe. We were particularly excited by the response to this survey and to the free-text responses regarding the librarians' key challenges and benefits related to working on Open Education; this has generated many new insights. We’re sharing these with you today - offering a glimpse at what’s to come.

We have excerpted the section of the report dealing with challenges, benefits and opportunities for libraries working on Open Education and packaged it for you to review now. 

Download the excerpt.

Help us grow the respondent pool: Survey of Open Science infrastructure underway
While we are encouraged by the number of responses so far to our Open Infrastructure survey,  we’d like you to help us identify regional, national and international OA and OS services or infrastructure. This is important for sustaining Open Science.

The survey, which is being conducted for Invest in Open Infrastructure, should take approximately 30 minutes to complete and will be open until 5 June 2020. 

The bar graph below provides a quick snapshot of country representation among our current respondents. At present, there are multiple countries from which we have only one response. Please take a moment to note where gaps exist—and if you know of a potential respondent, we urge you to share the survey with them and request that they participate. 

Share the survey.

New Open Infra research project on the horizon
Within a few weeks, SPARC Europe will initiate a new series of interviews with 10 key Open Infrastructure services/resources; these interviews are part of an ongoing process to gain an in-depth understanding of important nodes in the Open Science ecosystem of services. This work feeds into Invest in Open Infrastructure.

At issue
OS infrastructure/services must be able to grow and develop and maintain operations, yet there is a scarcity of financial instruments and pathways for them to raise funds. This makes them vulnerable to potential acquisition by commercial operations, which lack the trust of many in the library, research and funder community.The Open infrastructure ecosystem has grown organically over time, developing in tandem with Open Science to support it as is it matured. This has led to a situation where comprehensive information is lacking on these services - and on the network as a whole; information that is vital to devising effective, sustainable means to secure that which is essential. 

Via these interviews, we will be looking to gain knowledge around the challenges that services face when looking to grow and sustain their work, and the consequences, both positive and negative, of joining forces with others. What choices were they compelled to make in the process?

Members of the IOI Steering Group, which SPARC Europe is working with on the survey, are making a pre-selection of services to interview; the intent is to select a range of services that support the research process and show the complexity of business models currently being employed. 

Interviews will be shared as vignettes showing the variety of approaches to sustainability that are underway. These results will be shared with the community at large in the Autumn.

Our response to the UKRI OA Policy consultation
SPARC Europe submitted a response to the UKRI OA policy consultation this week.

Read it here.