OA Week 2025: Where we go from here

In today’s blog post, Ana Noriega, Associate Director and Head of Collections Management, interviews Natalie Hill on Colby Libraries’ open access progress and where this work may head over the next few years. Natalie joined Colby Libraries in fall 2023 as Scholarly Communications Librarian. In this position, she is responsible for supporting faculty, staff, and student scholars in their research pursuits, facilitating broad access to information, and serving as a library liaison to Global Studies, Music, and Psychology.

Q: While the scholarly communications role is relatively new to Colby, you have established some important infrastructure and strategic initiatives already. Can you speak to some of those?

While a formalized role for scholarly communications has only existed at Colby Libraries for about 5 years, I’ve been fortunate in my time at Colby to make some progress quickly due to a preexisting culture of support for open publishing and increased access to information. For example, Colby-Bates-Bowdoin collections librarians had already done the hard work of initially negotiating a transformative agreement with Cambridge University Press, and I was able to join in the renewal process. Having that first agreement in place has made it easier to go through the process with other publishers, and I’m very proud of our upcoming Read and Publish agreement with Oxford University Press and the ways in which it will benefit Colby authors and researchers.

It has been important to me to acknowledge and highlight all of the great work already happening at Colby Libraries. One way to do this has been through the creation and regular updating of a comprehensive Open Education guide, which gives people the ability to access information related to our open initiatives in a singular and enduring location, according to their own interests, needs, and availability.

Additionally, in response to ongoing student concerns over course material affordability, I’ve led a Libraries’ project team focused on expanding access to course reserves for all 100-level required books. Stewarding this kind of initiative successfully wouldn’t have been possible without my colleagues’ holistic commitment to openness.

Q: Where does Colby fit into the OA landscape?

As a research-intensive liberal arts college, I think Colby occupies a very interesting place in the current OA landscape. Most OA initiatives are formed and led by or in support of the interests of large research universities, and the push for open access to information has been defined primarily around free access to taxpayer-funded research. Commercial publishers should not be able to profit off of publicly funded research by charging institutions (primarily, their libraries) for access to that information through the form of high-cost database subscriptions.

As a small liberal arts college, Colby does not receive enough public research funding to feel the same kind of pressure that larger institutions face. However, I think having such a strong research program for our size that is led by our liberal arts values encourages us to embrace open access as a moral imperative. We want those outside of Colby to benefit from the knowledge that we have gained, and we want our work to grow human understanding and to solve real-world problems. Due to this ethos, Colby Libraries has been able to use our fiscal resources to support forward-thinking and community-led publishing initiatives that may be undervalued by larger research institutions or inaccessible to other liberal arts institutions with less financial means. We can be an OA leader among smaller institutions and really punch above our weight class.

Q: How do you see OA work evolving, and what would you hope to accomplish at Colby in the next few years?

I think that OA work will continue to grow toward collective purchasing and community-led publishing. With massive changes to federal funding that are currently unfolding, it’s hard to make too many claims with certainty, but I believe these changes (no matter how short or long-term they may be) are causing researchers, libraries, and institutions to critically reflect on the current scholarly publishing industry. I think that transformative agreements will become far less common, and Read and Publish deals will become cost-prohibitive for many institutions, so it’s important to support diamond OA publishing and intentionally create opportunities for journal editorial boards to exist and publish outside of commercial interests. One exciting development in this area is the Open Journals Collective, which will formally launch this January.

In the next few years at Colby, I hope to continue building strong relationships with faculty, staff, and student researchers to better understand their needs and figure out how to support them as individuals and ensure equitable access to information. I would like to continue building out Colby Libraries’ scholarly communications infrastructure, especially when it comes to our institutional repository. I’d also like to do some focused outreach around ORCID and its usefulness as a free and open tool for issues like name disambiguation, scholarly identity formation, and research integrity.