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Building Relationships with Today's Library
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Building Relationships with Today's Library
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Segment:0 .
Come we'll get started up. We'll get started shortly. Just letting people assemble. Hello, everyone. We'll get started shortly.
Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We'll get underway in about 20 seconds. Just letting folks assemble. OK we can get started. So thank you and welcome to today's SSP webinar, building relationships with today's library.
Before we start, I want to thank our 2025 education sponsors, access innovations and silver chair. We are, as always, grateful for your support. My name is Lori Carlin. I am the chief Commercial Officer at Delta ink and the co-chair of the SSP education committee. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically.
Please use the Q&A feature in Zoom to enter questions for the moderator and panelists. You can also use the chat feature to communicate directly with other participants and the organizers. To send chat messages to everyone in the session, select everyone from the 2nd drop down instead of all panelists. Closed captions have been enabled.
If you don't see the CC icon on your toolbar, you can view captions by selecting the More option on your screen and choosing Show Captions in the dropdown menu. This one hour session will be recorded and available to registrants following today's event. Registered attendees will be sent an email when the recording is available. A quick note on SPS code of conduct and today's meeting. We are committed to diversity, equity, and providing an inclusive meeting environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas free of harassment, discrimination, and hostile conduct.
We ask all participants, whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. So now I'd like to move on to our webinar today, and I'll start by introducing our moderator today. Melissa Kim, scholarly communications librarian at Excelsior University and also a member of our education committee and the webinar subcommittee.
Melissa is the first scholarly communications librarian at Excelsior University, where she both created and manages the university's scholarly publishing platform and institutional repository. She holds an MLIS degree from Saint John's University and an Ma in history from Queen Mary, the University of London, and holds certificates in open education and Creative Commons licensing. She was a Spark open education leadership fellow for their 2022 2023 cohort, a society of scholarly publishing fellow for 2024.
Applause special applause for that and SAP fellow for 2024 and a member of the Fulbright specialist roster from 2024 to 2027. So thank you, Melissa, for taking on the moderating duties for this session. And I will pass on to you to get us underway. Thank you so much, Lori, and Thank you so much, everybody, for attending today. I'm really excited.
I think we're going to have a great discussion on what's going on with libraries today. Yeah Thank you so much for such a great intro. So let's continue the introductions. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and kind of a background about your institution. So why don't we start with Anneliese. Hi, everyone.
I'm Anneliese Stahl, scholarly communications librarian at Michigan Technological university's Van Pelt and ob library. So in that role, I'm involved in a number of different areas of scholarly communication, including data management. Planning, research data management. I serve as an expert in open educational resources and licensing.
I'm an administrator for our institutional repository, and I assist our community, including the public, in a variety of intellectual property areas copyright, patents, trademarks, open licensing and on top of that, just run of the mill reference duties. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Michigan Technological University, we are a public University that just achieved r-1 status, so we are a doctoral granting institution with very high research activity.
We do have programs in humanities and social sciences, but we have a pretty heavy focus on STEM fields. We have been known as an engineering University traditionally, so we have about 7,000 students. About 6,000 of those are undergraduate students and about 1,500 grad students speaking geographically, we are in a very rural, very remote part of Michigan's Upper peninsula. And to give you an idea of where hope Michigan is, it's about a nine hour drive down to Charles at the University of Michigan.
And one important thing to note about the Van Pelt library is that we do not have subject librarians. We use a functional model where we each have different duties in scholarly communications or instruction reference, that sort of thing. So keep that in mind as I continue with the discussion, and I'll hand it off there. And Thank you so much, annelise, and congratulations on Michigan Tech getting R1 status.
That's really exciting. Charles, can you would you like to go next. Thank you, Melissa. Yes I'm Charles Watkinson, I'm an associate University librarian at University of Michigan, and my main portfolio is actually in a space that we refer to as publishing. And that would include the responsibility for University of Michigan Press, which is a book publisher of about 100 books a year.
The Michigan publishing services, which supports open access journals and other sorts of publications. The institutional repository, which includes a data repository. At the moment, we're a couple of associate University librarians down, so I'm also sharing responsibility for the collections division. My main focus there is actually less on the acquisition side, although I'm still involved in that and more on the special collections and preservation side.
University of Michigan is a research one doctoral granting University. It's a big institution, and although people in the institution say they don't care, we always get excited that we're number RA21 in the world. In the US News and World Report rankings. So a large University, a big health system doing a lot of different things. OK Thank you so much, Charles.
And also that's the thing that's going to come up very often in this chat. Librarians wearing multiple hats I'm sure that's going to come up very often. And Michael, last but not least. Great Yeah. Thanks I'm Michael Clark, I'm the Dean of libraries at the University of Denver, and I've been the dean for a decade, but I've been at the University for 26 years.
And before this I was an associate dean. Before that, I was the collections librarian, and before that I was a reference librarian like Charles. I'm wearing many hats. I am simultaneously the dean. I'm filling in for the vacant associate dean position that I used to hold. And I'm filling in for the vacant collections librarian position that I also used to hold.
I mean, I'm doing my last two jobs while I also do my current job. It's a little bit challenging, especially because this is a pretty active time for collection development decisions. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a bit. University of Denver is an R1, but is probably at the other end of the scale of R1 from Michigan. Michigan's one of the very biggest ones, and University of Denver is one of the smallest.
We have about 11,000 students. It's about 55% grad student and about 45% undergrad. We are sort of a smaller scale publisher publisher in terms of publishing, and we're smaller scale in terms of research than most are ones we do 50 million, a little over $50 million in research a year. I and I said, it's a private University. Yeah so I'll leave it there.
Great Thank you so much, Michael. I'm so glad that we have such a range of sizes and backgrounds to our institutions, the types of students that you serve, type of research that you do. I'm glad that we had that kind of diversity. So let's start with the elephant in the room. Let's talk about some current events. How is the current political climate impacting your professional environment at the moment.
If you can speak to your actual institution generally and then maybe your library specifically, that would be great. What are you seeing and hearing. How will this impact your ability to serve your communities. It's a really weighty topic. So let's start off with noise. So in response to executive orders.
Michigan Tech did restructure units focused on Days and I say restructured because none of our staff were laid off. They were homed in other areas of the institution. So for those looking for silver linings, that may be one nobody lost their job as a response to those orders, we do see some concern over research funding, NSF, NIH. I think our leadership remains optimistic.
We are really trying to focus on how we can leverage our new status as R1 to keep the ball rolling. On the library side of things, we are concerned with this change to R1. How does that affect our subscription costs. We do have a flat budget and subscription costs rise with inflation, of course, which just at a basic level means that we have to do more with less.
You know, in that situation and then some pricing models are based on that status. So with that R1 designation, our subscriptions going to cost even more. And with our flat budget, what does that mean that we can provide for our community with uncertainty. With IMLS funding, we think about the Michigan e-library mall.
We not only use that for interlibrary loan services, but we do get some databases through that service and now relies on some IMLS funding. So there's some uncertainty there, and we're keeping an eye on what we can continue to do as time goes on, but not really a lot of concrete information there at this time. So with that, I will pass the mic. Yeah Thank you for that.
Annalise I know uncertainty is happening in a lot of institutions, but I'm glad that you haven't seen too many staff cuts just, just yet. So that's always a good silver lining to have. Michael, would you like to go next. Yeah, sure. So as I mentioned, we're a relatively small. We have a relatively small research portfolio, about $50 million a year in federal funding.
So while we're concerned about funding and NSF and NIH and so on, it's not an existential threat. So if the FAA costs go down to 15% or if the grants go away entirely, we could survive. It won't be easy. But but it's also not the same problem as a massive research institution. We've had certainly had some grants cut and canceled at the University.
But but it's not our biggest concern. We we sort of have a slight decrease in the number of PhDs that we're admitting as, as we think through the economic uncertainty around, around funding. But we haven't cut PhDs the way that some larger institutions have had to. We are we have a relatively low international student population. The fact that it didn't recover for us after COVID is, is feeling like a good thing right now because we don't have to worry about international students not coming.
Our endowment is below the threshold for new taxes, so that's good. We have been great and I'm really proud of the institution and that we have not de-emphasized DEI or changed the names of any programs that are related to DEI. We're standing firm there. Our biggest worry as an institution is around financial aid, the cancellation potentially of the Graduate PLUS loans and the Parent PLUS loans.
The caps that may be coming into place on Pell grants and on other student loans that could that's in some ways possibly an existential threat to us. This isn't related, but we're also hitting the enrollment cliff that we've been predicting for a decade or more. And University of Denver's undergraduate enrollment numbers have declined over several years.
We're in we're in the first year of massive cuts. We've the library took a 5% cut to our overall budget, which we applied to our collections budget. And it's about a 10% cut to the collections budget. And we're anticipating we're not anticipating. We know we are having a similar cut in fiscal year 26, and I can't imagine we won't have a similar cut in fiscal year 27. I'll stop there.
Great Thank you. Michael Yeah, that's interesting that you're going to see a decrease in the number of PhDs emitted. That'll that'll definitely be something that'll affect the library pretty strongly. Charles, would you like to go next. Yeah I think it's really useful to have these different institutional perspectives because you can see the concerns hit us all differently at University of Michigan, our research funding exposure is huge.
So we had over $2 billion in annual research expenditures last year. So federal funding cuts are the biggest risk here. Most changes to indirect costs are currently stalled in the courts. But one of the issues is that there's so much uncertainty. Therefore, we're only a court challenge, a court resolution away from incurring very, very large reductions in research funding that it causes the institution to pull in its resources.
So a lot of spending cut, cut or, you know, anything to do with discretionary spending, things like travel, and so on, are there's a strong emphasis on fiscal responsibility within the institution. And that's going to extend to how we spend our collections budget. I think what's really striking is that there's just so much extra overhead in actually dealing with all of these issues.
So we had a briefing from the head of Government Affairs at the University and he said, you know, in a normal year, the University is dealing with maybe three areas of institutional concern. And this year they're dealing with 17. So it's just every so what we're seeing is we're seeing the central administration and the leadership of the University very distracted. And that makes it sometimes hard to get things done.
And in terms of thinking about those 17, you know, China engagement, Chinese students are protecting our international students from difficulty, anti-Semitism on campus, making sure that we really clamp down on that and are seen to be doing so. Indirect cost recovery. Michael's already mentioned this push to bring all the indirect costs down from what was for us, you know, 56% down to 15% Title IX LGBTQ protection, endowment and tax issues, visa and immigration policies, financial aid, NIH reform, academic freedom questions, campus safety, financial scenarios, tariffs as well.
So there's just a lot. And that means that we get a bit frozen in decision making. And I think in some ways, that's what we're seeing the most at the moment. Yeah Thank you for that Charles. A lot of those kind of existential cultural questions are some of the things that we're going to go into a little bit here too.
So a few of you have mentioned already what you anticipate with your collection development. So let's dig a little bit deeper into collection development. What can you say about the future of collection development at your libraries and of particular interest to our audience. What should publishers know about the upcoming renewal season and beyond. Charles, do you want to start us off.
Yes so so we've been modeling a 5% cut as a library. We have received our budget news, and we're still a little bit unsure whether we'll need to do that 5% cut. But we do know that we won't have any increases to take account of inflation. So in reality, we already have a cut in place and we may have another cut coming. I think that's where we think we are at the moment.
So definitely means that this is going to be a tough renewal season. And I think we are tending to think more about collaborative consortial buying and consortial deals than we ever used to. The Big Ten Academic Alliance is becoming really, really important as our negotiating front, and we have recently signed a big transformative agreement with Springer Nature on the heels of a transformative agreement with Wiley.
So, I mean, and that's all through the Big Ten Academic Alliance. So I think you'll see us more and more using our consortia relationships to try and get the best deals. But certainly even at this point, we know we've got a flat budget and we could easily get a further cut coming. Yeah, that's an interesting point about transformative agreements and also kind of more relationship building and consortium building too.
I'm interested to see if our other panelists have similar experiences. Annalise would you like to go next. Sure Thanks, Melissa. So the Van Pelt library is very excited to welcome your new collections librarian. They are working in person after a short period of working remotely just this month. So we in that hire definitely showed that this is an area that we value, continue to value using our funds strategically to make these purchases, dedicating a role to it.
So as this person gets their feet underneath them, they definitely have an eye on accommodating, accommodating, potentially increased research activities under our R1 status. Of course, keeping in mind that funding uncertainty and dealing with a flat budget as potentially those subscription costs rise with that status change. So our collections budget, of course, is funded through research revenue.
And if this means less research activity and a tighter research budget, you know, overhead slashed, it will create a pretty difficult budget situation for us. So we're keeping an eye on the situation. We don't really have a lot of information past this fiscal year, but we're hopeful that ash is going to be doing everything he can to ease us through any, any difficulties that we have moving forward.
Great I'm glad that you have a new member of the team to take on that burden a little bit. Let's go to Michael. Yeah so I already mentioned we're, we're under we're going under budget cuts at the University of Denver. And again, 5% cut to the overall library budget in the fiscal year 25, which we're about to end, and another 5% in fiscal year 26.
We've chosen to take that from the collections budget and to protect positions. And when I talk to colleagues around the country, that's what they're saying as well. Right there. When you when they have a choice, when the University doesn't specifically allocate money to one or the other pool, and they have the opportunity to decide how to, how to fund the library as a whole.
They're choosing to protect positions at, at the expense of collections. We're seeing 10% cuts at the University of Denver. And I, I think that we should all be expecting that there will be 10% or so collections across the entire R1 and R2 landscape, at least. And, you know, so I was talking to a colleague who's the University librarian at an Ivy League institution the other day.
She said that she's seeing roughly 5% to 10% cuts coming in the next year, and she thinks she's in a better position than most of her Ivy League colleagues. So I think it's pretty dire. And and I don't think it's, we've been talking about what? Not being able to afford our subscriptions for years. Right we've the serials crisis started before I became a librarian 25 years ago, but we still talk about it.
But at the University of Denver, we are finally at the point where we are breaking apart our big deals. We've already set in place the breaking apart of our Elsevier deal. We are. I've got meetings with two of the other large publishers at ala this weekend, and we'll be talking to all of them about cutting apart our deals. Like like Charles, we, we're trying to lean in as much as possible on collaboration with partners in the various consortia consortia that we were part of, the greater Western library alliance and the Colorado alliance of Research Libraries.
Most importantly. But I think everybody in those consortia is facing budget cuts. And so our ability to collaborate is less than it was a year or two ago. It's pretty dire, I think. Yeah, I agree with that. And I find it interesting that all of your organizations are kind of taking almost a people first initiative, prioritizing someone's position over New collection development.
And I think in our current political climate, that is a form of resistance when you think about it too. So we mentioned we talked a little bit about collection development. So let's talk a little bit more about transformative agreements. What's the view on these agreements currently and how are you going to work on them going forward. And what's the best kind of future idealized view of transformative agreements.
Do you want to jump in again, Michael. Sure so I'll start by saying that I've been skeptical of the idea of transformative agreements from the beginning. Write the idea that they will actually transform anything. I'm not sure when we get to the point where things have actually transformed. If you essentially are creating a bigger big deal. That said, we're participating in several because I wanted to try them out and see what happens.
And I, I, you know, I don't think that it's fair to criticize something if you don't, you know, give it a chance to work. But we're also breaking apart our big deals. And we have a transformative agreement with Elsevier. And we're going to break apart the Elsevier big deal, which means that we're going to break apart. We're we're going to give up that transformative agreement. And I don't I don't know what the right answer is there.
I, I want to continue to support open access publishing. I want to I think it's the future that we need. I think especially given declining budgets for collections. There's even more need for it than before. And yet the lever of using your subscription to help support open access is going. That's a my metaphor didn't work because I said the lever but.
Right but that we're declining pretty rapidly in what we can afford to put into support of open access. And if the Office of Research and Sponsored programs is going to be contributing to it, their dollars are declining as overhead dollars from grants go away as well. So I'm not very optimistic. But maybe maybe this gives us a chance to explore other models of open access that we haven't even thought of yet.
And Charles, you had mentioned transformative agreements briefly in our last section on collection development. Do you have anything to add. Yeah So last year, we did a campus survey just to find out how faculty were thinking about various things related to the library, including open access. And one of the things that was very clear is that the vast majority of our faculty who responded are involved in open access.
So 80% had either published in open access or were planning to the same kind of proportion of were really struggling to work out where to get the funding, and they were finding the overhead of figuring that out really bit into their kind of research time. And so on. So transformative agreements do help with that, and faculty do find it popular and are really used taking or making use of those.
I mean, we see surges in publisher, you know, people actually going to a particular publisher once a transformative agreement is signed, which of course, as a library makes us a little bit nervous because that is kind of making the rich richer, right? I mean, it makes the Wiley's, et cetera, those who are able to cope with the complexity, it increases their share of the pie. So we're really wrestling with that question of meeting a faculty need versus doing following our values with transformative agreements.
I think we haven't quite found the right balance yet, but something that we're definitely doing is we're putting in place many more systems around making decisions. And certainly with open access, we are creating a rubric that many other R1 and other institutions have created. Now a rubric for evaluating new open access investment decisions, which actually creates some weighting for more bibliodiversity for really supporting smaller publishers, supporting independent publishers.
And I think that's really important. And I think also that scrutiny. So we've created a new collections steering group as well for big ticket decisions and big issues. So that scrutiny and just being a lot more careful with our money in general. And just really doubling down on fiscal responsibility, is also an overarching feature of what we're doing at the moment.
All right. That is a very good point about making the rich richer. One thing that always comes up in discussions of open access is there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone will pay, someone has to pay somewhere, and the discussion comes down. Well, who is going to pay. Is it the libraries.
Is it the researchers, the readers that really comes down to it in the end. Anyways, I'm curious what your thoughts are. My perspective really echoes everything Charles and Michael have said. We really value publishing open access, but at the end of the day, what funds are going to be available for that. We need to support the teaching and research needs of our University.
And though our collections librarian is going through a process right now to see if our collections policy can be updated, that definitely isn't going to change. So finding that right balance, as my fellow panelists have already noted, is really important. How do we continue our mission in that and also, you know, continue to show that we support publishing open access. And it's going to be really difficult with a flat budget or, you know, budget cuts moving forward.
One question that my fellow librarians have in going into transformative agreements has to do with what work goes into that for the institution staff. Because we are a small institution and our staff is small but mighty. But any additional work that is required of us, we need to think very critically about who is doing that and what time commitment that will take.
So also a really critical factor that we need to consider when going into transformative agreements. OK and speaking of transformation and a kind of more general, wider sense, let's talk about how the role of the library is changing or evolving in terms of teaching and learning. I could jump in here for a little bit. So my institution, Excelsior University, is completely online.
We serve mostly older students. Non-traditional students, first time college attenders. And so what I've noticed in general with how the role of the library is changing, is that with this push for the use of open access, particularly open educational resources, and changing courses into 0 textbook course, zero textbook cost courses, instead of maybe some other textbook textbook affordability deals or programs.
There's this kind of new philosophical shift, I think, where we're seeing students not just as learners, but we're seeing students as customers. We want to give them the best deal for their money because what do customers have. Customers have choices. So at the end of the day, you want your customer, your student to choose your institution. And I think with this kind of switch to more open things, that is great.
That will get students to come to your institution. But of course, when we're seeing students as customers, the role of the library changes a little bit more in the sense that we're not just helping students with their research. Helping faculty with their research, too. We are in customer service, too. And so I'm curious what everyone's thoughts are. And at least you want to jump in and talk about how you think the role of the library is changing in this kind of teaching and learning bubble.
Sure, Yeah. The Van Pelt NLP library is increasingly interested in supporting affordable and accessible course materials. As an expert in open educational resources, I support the community in that respect, consulting in how instructors can choose or create different open resources in the classroom. And that role is represented on our University standing committee, which I chair the committee for accessible and Affordable Learning materials, which is a committee that shows just how important accessibility and affordability is to Michigan Tech as a whole.
That group is made up of a broad swath of Representatives from across the University, and has really helped build ties between our Center for Teaching and Learning and campus store. So we've started a project on campus, the textbook affordability project, with our campus store. They provide us a list of adopted titles every semester, and the library goes through that to see what titles are available through the library, so that we can highlight those for students and they can make choices based on what works for them.
Whether a library, copy, print or electronic is going to be sufficient or an option at any point. So in developing that project, we've also been looking at what titles we may be able to select and actually purchase for our collections, because we've had a position historically that we do not purchase textbooks, period. We've been easing up on that a little bit when we get requests, if we have it in our monographs budget, which is not huge.
We could potentially buy a print copy or an electronic copy upon request. So with our new collections person in place, we will be reviewing this list of titles from the campus store to see, especially for high enrollment courses, what texts we might be able to purchase. We have done a review for that for our highest enrollment courses, and found that we were not able to purchase anything based on the licenses that we were interested in.
Unlimited see perpetual licensing. And as we hear that publishers maybe change those policies where we're really paying attention to that for sure. Our Instruction Team is busy building stronger relationships with many departments across campus. So definitely involved in that area. They are really doing a lot of work.
So I mentioned, we don't have subject librarians. We're functional specialists. We we don't see ourselves as experts in any specific field. So they do a lot of work getting to know the different resources that they use in classrooms. But they're not experts in the courses that they go into. So we're very dependent on the metadata that publishers provide to us to help these students, who are also not experts, to navigate these resources and teach them how to use them.
So making sure that the metadata provided in those databases is accurate and can be used for the lessons that they have in mind, is really important. And I think that's about it. I I'll pass the mic at the moment. OK we can pass it on to Michael. Sure Yeah. Thank you. And Anneliese mentioned the fact that of like we don't do textbooks is a pretty common message that you hear from libraries in terms of collection development.
And we've always said that here. And I've realized over the last decade or so, as OER has become more of an emphasis for institutions, that it was a really big mistake for libraries, I think. I think saying we don't do textbooks is implying that we don't do teaching and learning, and that all we're here for is research. Right and that's never been true.
But it seems like that's the message we're sending. And so I'm, you know, we've been trying to be more intentional on how we think. We're still not buying a lot of textbooks, partly because the textbook model is badly broken. And we certainly can't afford to buy a new edition every other year when it's just a new edition to keep the used market at Bay. Right but but we are buying more textbooks and we are.
We're trying to work more closely on getting our faculty to understand that the licensed resources that we have are essentially free to their students. We've done some support on OER. I was on the Colorado OER council for several years. This this is a council that's part of its statutory council. It's part of the Department of Higher Education. It provides $1 million in funding annually to the public institutions in the state to flip over toward OER.
And, you know, I was there as a private institution representative and couldn't receive any of the money. But it was interesting to see how much of the OER work on the public campuses in Colorado is being driven by, by librarians, and this goes from community colleges up to the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Colorado State University, the two big ones. So I think that's really encouraging.
And I and I and I think that we should be thinking more about supporting course materials. The other just the one other thought before I turn it over to Charles is that, that. We've been approached in libraries for years by companies like Clarivate and Elsevier to help fund tools to support research.
And there's always this tricky navigation with the Office of Research about who supports that. More and more recently, we've been or at least I've been getting approached by companies small, often small startup companies that have really interesting teaching and learning tools. And I'm having those similar conversations with our Office of Teaching and learning. Right so there are these tools and often these new interesting applications of AI.
And just like these research support tools, they there isn't an obvious place for them on campus. And people are coming to the library. But I'm saying I can't cover that because I don't have a budget for it. So just a thought about and maybe it's worth talking about a little bit when we get into conversation about AI.
Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah go ahead Charles. Yeah that's a really interesting point that Michael makes I mean. So one of the what I, I always feel very, very sorry for anybody trying to sell anything to the University of Michigan because it's such a distributed entity that it's hard enough when you're inside it to know who to talk to about getting an investment in something.
And so navigating it from the outside is kind of a nightmare. And it is really hard when you see these really interesting looking initiatives, things like the Scylla initiative, where looking at ways of analyzing curricula to identify potentially good substitutes for, you know, expensive textbooks and things like that. It's really difficult to know where to point people like that because the library is not really the right, quite the right place for evaluating.
We don't have good ways of evaluating those things, which are essentially software tools. So anyhow, that is a really interesting point that Michael makes. I mean, we don't have an awful lot happening on as a library on the textbook teaching and Learning Resource space that is mainly happening at the college levels. And there's quite a lot of opacity about what is happening in each college.
I will say that we are seeing more and more use when we look at usage stats of licensed resources, like articles and chapters that we're licensing for research. What we thought we were licensing for research purposes, being actually used and assigned to courses. And that's something that's quite striking. And it's not necessarily just at the upper level courses. It's also happening as faculty members try and sort of maybe redesign their courses a little bit to expose students to real to sort of primary source materials.
I mean, real research articles and so on. Earlier in the experience. And there are some initiatives on campus that are really looking at foundational courses. So there's really, really big courses with multi sections. And one of the things they're looking at is how to redesign those in ways that are not so reliant on having a single textbook, for example. So that's an interesting thing that's happening.
And I think, you know, some of the things that publishers produce, and especially those that they make available DRM free, that they were thinking were primarily for researchers, you may be starting to see interesting spikes in usage, which suggests that there's this alternative audience for those types of materials, and those would be students using them in courses.
Yeah Thank you so much for that. Before we move on to a different topic, I want to open it up to the group. So please feel free to chime in. What more would you like publishers to know about the needs of your libraries, your students, faculty where publishers are involved. What would help you do your job more effectively. So please feel free to jump in.
Yeah I'll chime in first. I think just keeping in mind our budget difficulties is first and foremost for us. You know, we might have a flat budget, but that in reality means that we will have to cut resources. And if things become even more expensive because of that R1 status, it's going to be even worse for us. I think that in thinking about the accelerated NIH public access policy, I have an eye on how that is going to impact our community.
I do expect a lot of questions when faculty come back after the summer. And essentially what that policy states is that researchers who have NIH funds need to submit their accepted manuscript into PMC by the time the publisher that they have submitted to makes their copy available. So what happens with that situation and any licensing implications might be difficult for our community to navigate.
So the library is standing ready to help with any of those issues. And hopefully publishers will be understanding of that policy change, which is just right around the corner. At that at this point. I mentioned textbook purchasing earlier. There have. There's been at least one publisher that has amended how libraries are able to purchase.
Ebooks we definitely have an interest in that. So, you know, Thank you for those who are thinking of libraries and amending those policies to make it more make it easier for us to get unlimited seat perpetual access licenses. I think those are three big areas that we can say that we're hoping publishers have an eye on. And we also are very interested in how publishers are navigating the title.
Two update according to accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act, we're hoping for some transparency as that deadline for compliance comes closer, because we want and need to make sure that all of the Materials that we provide are going to be accessible under that requirement. Oh, Thank you, Charles and Michael, do you have anything to add before we move on to our final discussion of I just plus 1 to both of those points, two of those points that anneliese made.
Just the navigational bit is really tough for faculty. I mean, there's a lot of extra complexity. And one of the things is, you know, however good a publisher's own kind of educational materials are, the reality is that faculty aren't going to want to look at publisher BI Publisher, BI Publisher, BI Publisher. They really kind of need that central source of help with navigation of things like how does what are my options around APCs, for example.
So really helping libraries to with information that will make it easy for them to communicate through LibGuides or whatever. How how to think about these kind of complex questions across multiple publishers. That's really useful. The also plus 1 for the ADA Title. Two as public universities, that's very, very big on our campuses.
And April 2026 does not seem a long time away. A couple of other things in the student area, we're seeing a lot more use of audio around research. I mean, I know that, you know, audio versions of research articles and research books can be quite tricky. And this may feed into our AI conversation, but we are seeing students using those audio versions of research materials more and more.
And that's a really interesting thing to watch. And then the other thing is we're all in it together at the moment in terms of trying to tell why tell the story of why research matters to everyday, to people in their everyday work. And I think that's going to be an area that we can all collaborate on and have to. I think there's a major feeling at University of Michigan that we haven't done a good job of telling the story of research in terms of how it impacts me, like, what is the benefit for me as an individual of the work that you over in that University do.
We've tended to tell the story in terms of our own successes, rather than the successes of people who benefit from research, and that would be higher education in general, not just the research activities. So anything we can do together to tell the story of why investments in research and in high quality teaching matter that will be really good for collaboration. OK Thank you both.
Michael, did you have anything to add in the interest of time, I do want us to talk a little bit about AI before we open up for questions. Yeah, I'll just add some one. One quick point. You know, I've been thinking a lot and I've actually been speaking at conferences a lot about one step further from what Charles ended with that. Libraries don't do a very good job of explaining our value to our administrations.
And anything that publishers can do to help us tell that story would be really helpful. So being able to talk to our provosts and our board of trustees and whoever it is, whoever else is responsible for funding the library and explaining not that this article gets used a lot, but what does that mean. That this article gets used a lot. So how do we tell the story of the value of the library in educating our students and in helping the University fulfill its mission.
OK, so we cannot leave today without talking about AI. So just really quick, let's talk a little bit about this giant elf in the room, which is AI. How has AI impacted your library already. How can you see it factoring into your services in the future and can prompt. Can publishers actually help with this. Charles, do you want to go first.
And then we could go with Michael and Anneliese before opening for questions. Yeah so on the training, on the educational side, lots and lots of concerns among faculty about how this is influencing student education. At the library end, we need a way of being able to know if an AI tool is embedded in a publisher product and a way of turning it off if faculty get really complaining.
On the research side, actually, there's a lot of interest and demand for access to content for AI training. So we have a very strong data science, computing programs and license agreements that would allow us to have some kind of non-commercial access to that content would be extremely popular and extremely helpful. So just looking at license agreements and thinking about how the text and data mining clause might be expanded would be very helpful indeed.
Michael did you. Oh, Yeah. Go ahead. I'll just jump in. Right? Yeah. So similar concerns at my institution about teaching and how people are using how students, especially are using AI.
There's I think a pretty deep concern about. Unintentional use of AI and what we can do to mitigate that. I'm a little concerned about the fact that, that so many publishers are investing in, in AI tools. Which is great on some level. There are ethical issues. There are issues about needing to turn it off, but there's also just a practical issue of how do we afford this.
I, I was on the advisory board for or an advisory board meeting for a publisher earlier this week, and they demonstrated some really amazing AI tools that they're creating. This is a very large publisher. Their intent is to sell these tools to us. I can't afford none of us can afford to buy sort of an I add on every publisher platform. None of us is particularly interested, probably in a publisher specific AI tool.
And yet. It's probably inevitable that we're going to be having AI as a sort of discovery enhancement piece on every platform we have. And we need to think about that as something that is not an extra cost. I'm there are lots of tools that are AI specific that can do new things that can analyze text in ways that wasn't possible before.
That that can help with understanding and having a conversation around the text that are really interesting for teaching and learning. Those things we probably will want to invest in and come up with new money for. But that's very different than just plain, just sort of bells and whistles around discovery. And, and I just think that if any publishers are thinking that there's going to be money to be made on adding AI to the discovery.
I don't think there is. I had one more point, but it's gone and I'll stop because we're running out of time. Before we move to questions, I know. Lisa, do you have anything you wanted to add. Yeah I'll just quickly add that Charles, we're kind of in the same boat at Michigan Tech, where we do have courses that are creating AI tools as part of their coursework.
So we would like to make sure that there is, the information available for them to do that. And if publishers are just putting blanket statements on their content that I cannot be used, you know, how widespread is that going to be. And how would that impact the instruction and learning happening at the university? Another point is supporting authors who would like to publish open access or with Creative Commons license, but don't necessarily want their content to be used for AI.
And in just a couple of minutes, Creative Commons has a webinar that we'll be covering this issue. The C signals licenses that hopefully will indicate an author's desire or not, for their content to be used in that way. OK, Thank you so much. And I will turn it over to Lori so we can answer some questions. Sure so just I'm going to combine two questions.
They're sort of related in the interest of time. We had a question about subscribe to open as an approach and how that might work with the challenges you shared about transformative agreements. And another question on a small publisher who may have been doing a lot of enhancements may also be under economic pressures. We're looking to raise their rates going forward to because of the changes that they've made.
You know, how can publishers approach these different issues, these different models in a climate, as you've as you've discussed. I can jump in on the Subscribe to OpenAI part of it. And I'll try to be really quick. So first of all, I think it's a really intriguing model and has some real strengths. And it works as long as that whatever you're paying for to whatever you're subscribing to fits within your budget, there's a little bit of a free rider concern if there's enough subscription that people don't need to continue to subscribe to it.
And then there's a slightly different concern in that transformative agreements help the authors at my institution make their articles open. Subscribe to open. Makes articles open. But it doesn't necessarily help my authors and I need something that does both.
Great Thank you. I think on that second question, this is a tough time to be selling new products or raising prices substantially to try and recoup on prices, but I think libraries do really care about small publishers and wanting them to succeed. And I think total transparency is the best approach really coming and saying, look, here's the deal. We're really trying to do this thing.
We're listening to you as we do it. And when we do this price raising, it's not. It's to actually recoup the costs of our investments and here's how much our investments cost. I mean, as more transparency and the more emphasis on really listening and being a good communicator. I think will help a lot. That's great. Thank you.
Thank you. Charles all right. Well, we have reached the end of our hour. This has been a fantastic discussion. Thank you to all of our panelists and everybody participating today for sharing their time and expertise. We encourage attendees to provide feedback on today's webinar and provide suggestions for future webinars.
Please complete the evaluation form. You can scan. You can reach the forum by scanning the QR code that we're showing on the screen right now, or the evaluation link you will receive at the conclusion of this event. Thanks again to our sponsors, Silverchair and access innovations. Today's webinar was recorded. All registrants will be sent a link of the recording when it's posted on the SSP website.
And that concludes our session today. Thank you everyone. This has been wonderful.
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Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We'll get underway in about 20 seconds. Just letting folks assemble. OK we can get started. So thank you and welcome to today's SSP webinar, building relationships with today's library.
Before we start, I want to thank our 2025 education sponsors, access innovations and silver chair. We are, as always, grateful for your support. My name is Lori Carlin. I am the chief Commercial Officer at Delta ink and the co-chair of the SSP education committee. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping items to review. Attendee microphones have been muted automatically.
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We ask all participants, whether speaking or in chat, to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner. So now I'd like to move on to our webinar today, and I'll start by introducing our moderator today. Melissa Kim, scholarly communications librarian at Excelsior University and also a member of our education committee and the webinar subcommittee.
Melissa is the first scholarly communications librarian at Excelsior University, where she both created and manages the university's scholarly publishing platform and institutional repository. She holds an MLIS degree from Saint John's University and an Ma in history from Queen Mary, the University of London, and holds certificates in open education and Creative Commons licensing. She was a Spark open education leadership fellow for their 2022 2023 cohort, a society of scholarly publishing fellow for 2024.
Applause special applause for that and SAP fellow for 2024 and a member of the Fulbright specialist roster from 2024 to 2027. So thank you, Melissa, for taking on the moderating duties for this session. And I will pass on to you to get us underway. Thank you so much, Lori, and Thank you so much, everybody, for attending today. I'm really excited.
I think we're going to have a great discussion on what's going on with libraries today. Yeah Thank you so much for such a great intro. So let's continue the introductions. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your role and kind of a background about your institution. So why don't we start with Anneliese. Hi, everyone.
I'm Anneliese Stahl, scholarly communications librarian at Michigan Technological university's Van Pelt and ob library. So in that role, I'm involved in a number of different areas of scholarly communication, including data management. Planning, research data management. I serve as an expert in open educational resources and licensing.
I'm an administrator for our institutional repository, and I assist our community, including the public, in a variety of intellectual property areas copyright, patents, trademarks, open licensing and on top of that, just run of the mill reference duties. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Michigan Technological University, we are a public University that just achieved r-1 status, so we are a doctoral granting institution with very high research activity.
We do have programs in humanities and social sciences, but we have a pretty heavy focus on STEM fields. We have been known as an engineering University traditionally, so we have about 7,000 students. About 6,000 of those are undergraduate students and about 1,500 grad students speaking geographically, we are in a very rural, very remote part of Michigan's Upper peninsula. And to give you an idea of where hope Michigan is, it's about a nine hour drive down to Charles at the University of Michigan.
And one important thing to note about the Van Pelt library is that we do not have subject librarians. We use a functional model where we each have different duties in scholarly communications or instruction reference, that sort of thing. So keep that in mind as I continue with the discussion, and I'll hand it off there. And Thank you so much, annelise, and congratulations on Michigan Tech getting R1 status.
That's really exciting. Charles, can you would you like to go next. Thank you, Melissa. Yes I'm Charles Watkinson, I'm an associate University librarian at University of Michigan, and my main portfolio is actually in a space that we refer to as publishing. And that would include the responsibility for University of Michigan Press, which is a book publisher of about 100 books a year.
The Michigan publishing services, which supports open access journals and other sorts of publications. The institutional repository, which includes a data repository. At the moment, we're a couple of associate University librarians down, so I'm also sharing responsibility for the collections division. My main focus there is actually less on the acquisition side, although I'm still involved in that and more on the special collections and preservation side.
University of Michigan is a research one doctoral granting University. It's a big institution, and although people in the institution say they don't care, we always get excited that we're number RA21 in the world. In the US News and World Report rankings. So a large University, a big health system doing a lot of different things. OK Thank you so much, Charles.
And also that's the thing that's going to come up very often in this chat. Librarians wearing multiple hats I'm sure that's going to come up very often. And Michael, last but not least. Great Yeah. Thanks I'm Michael Clark, I'm the Dean of libraries at the University of Denver, and I've been the dean for a decade, but I've been at the University for 26 years.
And before this I was an associate dean. Before that, I was the collections librarian, and before that I was a reference librarian like Charles. I'm wearing many hats. I am simultaneously the dean. I'm filling in for the vacant associate dean position that I used to hold. And I'm filling in for the vacant collections librarian position that I also used to hold.
I mean, I'm doing my last two jobs while I also do my current job. It's a little bit challenging, especially because this is a pretty active time for collection development decisions. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a bit. University of Denver is an R1, but is probably at the other end of the scale of R1 from Michigan. Michigan's one of the very biggest ones, and University of Denver is one of the smallest.
We have about 11,000 students. It's about 55% grad student and about 45% undergrad. We are sort of a smaller scale publisher publisher in terms of publishing, and we're smaller scale in terms of research than most are ones we do 50 million, a little over $50 million in research a year. I and I said, it's a private University. Yeah so I'll leave it there.
Great Thank you so much, Michael. I'm so glad that we have such a range of sizes and backgrounds to our institutions, the types of students that you serve, type of research that you do. I'm glad that we had that kind of diversity. So let's start with the elephant in the room. Let's talk about some current events. How is the current political climate impacting your professional environment at the moment.
If you can speak to your actual institution generally and then maybe your library specifically, that would be great. What are you seeing and hearing. How will this impact your ability to serve your communities. It's a really weighty topic. So let's start off with noise. So in response to executive orders.
Michigan Tech did restructure units focused on Days and I say restructured because none of our staff were laid off. They were homed in other areas of the institution. So for those looking for silver linings, that may be one nobody lost their job as a response to those orders, we do see some concern over research funding, NSF, NIH. I think our leadership remains optimistic.
We are really trying to focus on how we can leverage our new status as R1 to keep the ball rolling. On the library side of things, we are concerned with this change to R1. How does that affect our subscription costs. We do have a flat budget and subscription costs rise with inflation, of course, which just at a basic level means that we have to do more with less.
You know, in that situation and then some pricing models are based on that status. So with that R1 designation, our subscriptions going to cost even more. And with our flat budget, what does that mean that we can provide for our community with uncertainty. With IMLS funding, we think about the Michigan e-library mall.
We not only use that for interlibrary loan services, but we do get some databases through that service and now relies on some IMLS funding. So there's some uncertainty there, and we're keeping an eye on what we can continue to do as time goes on, but not really a lot of concrete information there at this time. So with that, I will pass the mic. Yeah Thank you for that.
Annalise I know uncertainty is happening in a lot of institutions, but I'm glad that you haven't seen too many staff cuts just, just yet. So that's always a good silver lining to have. Michael, would you like to go next. Yeah, sure. So as I mentioned, we're a relatively small. We have a relatively small research portfolio, about $50 million a year in federal funding.
So while we're concerned about funding and NSF and NIH and so on, it's not an existential threat. So if the FAA costs go down to 15% or if the grants go away entirely, we could survive. It won't be easy. But but it's also not the same problem as a massive research institution. We've had certainly had some grants cut and canceled at the University.
But but it's not our biggest concern. We we sort of have a slight decrease in the number of PhDs that we're admitting as, as we think through the economic uncertainty around, around funding. But we haven't cut PhDs the way that some larger institutions have had to. We are we have a relatively low international student population. The fact that it didn't recover for us after COVID is, is feeling like a good thing right now because we don't have to worry about international students not coming.
Our endowment is below the threshold for new taxes, so that's good. We have been great and I'm really proud of the institution and that we have not de-emphasized DEI or changed the names of any programs that are related to DEI. We're standing firm there. Our biggest worry as an institution is around financial aid, the cancellation potentially of the Graduate PLUS loans and the Parent PLUS loans.
The caps that may be coming into place on Pell grants and on other student loans that could that's in some ways possibly an existential threat to us. This isn't related, but we're also hitting the enrollment cliff that we've been predicting for a decade or more. And University of Denver's undergraduate enrollment numbers have declined over several years.
We're in we're in the first year of massive cuts. We've the library took a 5% cut to our overall budget, which we applied to our collections budget. And it's about a 10% cut to the collections budget. And we're anticipating we're not anticipating. We know we are having a similar cut in fiscal year 26, and I can't imagine we won't have a similar cut in fiscal year 27. I'll stop there.
Great Thank you. Michael Yeah, that's interesting that you're going to see a decrease in the number of PhDs emitted. That'll that'll definitely be something that'll affect the library pretty strongly. Charles, would you like to go next. Yeah I think it's really useful to have these different institutional perspectives because you can see the concerns hit us all differently at University of Michigan, our research funding exposure is huge.
So we had over $2 billion in annual research expenditures last year. So federal funding cuts are the biggest risk here. Most changes to indirect costs are currently stalled in the courts. But one of the issues is that there's so much uncertainty. Therefore, we're only a court challenge, a court resolution away from incurring very, very large reductions in research funding that it causes the institution to pull in its resources.
So a lot of spending cut, cut or, you know, anything to do with discretionary spending, things like travel, and so on, are there's a strong emphasis on fiscal responsibility within the institution. And that's going to extend to how we spend our collections budget. I think what's really striking is that there's just so much extra overhead in actually dealing with all of these issues.
So we had a briefing from the head of Government Affairs at the University and he said, you know, in a normal year, the University is dealing with maybe three areas of institutional concern. And this year they're dealing with 17. So it's just every so what we're seeing is we're seeing the central administration and the leadership of the University very distracted. And that makes it sometimes hard to get things done.
And in terms of thinking about those 17, you know, China engagement, Chinese students are protecting our international students from difficulty, anti-Semitism on campus, making sure that we really clamp down on that and are seen to be doing so. Indirect cost recovery. Michael's already mentioned this push to bring all the indirect costs down from what was for us, you know, 56% down to 15% Title IX LGBTQ protection, endowment and tax issues, visa and immigration policies, financial aid, NIH reform, academic freedom questions, campus safety, financial scenarios, tariffs as well.
So there's just a lot. And that means that we get a bit frozen in decision making. And I think in some ways, that's what we're seeing the most at the moment. Yeah Thank you for that Charles. A lot of those kind of existential cultural questions are some of the things that we're going to go into a little bit here too.
So a few of you have mentioned already what you anticipate with your collection development. So let's dig a little bit deeper into collection development. What can you say about the future of collection development at your libraries and of particular interest to our audience. What should publishers know about the upcoming renewal season and beyond. Charles, do you want to start us off.
Yes so so we've been modeling a 5% cut as a library. We have received our budget news, and we're still a little bit unsure whether we'll need to do that 5% cut. But we do know that we won't have any increases to take account of inflation. So in reality, we already have a cut in place and we may have another cut coming. I think that's where we think we are at the moment.
So definitely means that this is going to be a tough renewal season. And I think we are tending to think more about collaborative consortial buying and consortial deals than we ever used to. The Big Ten Academic Alliance is becoming really, really important as our negotiating front, and we have recently signed a big transformative agreement with Springer Nature on the heels of a transformative agreement with Wiley.
So, I mean, and that's all through the Big Ten Academic Alliance. So I think you'll see us more and more using our consortia relationships to try and get the best deals. But certainly even at this point, we know we've got a flat budget and we could easily get a further cut coming. Yeah, that's an interesting point about transformative agreements and also kind of more relationship building and consortium building too.
I'm interested to see if our other panelists have similar experiences. Annalise would you like to go next. Sure Thanks, Melissa. So the Van Pelt library is very excited to welcome your new collections librarian. They are working in person after a short period of working remotely just this month. So we in that hire definitely showed that this is an area that we value, continue to value using our funds strategically to make these purchases, dedicating a role to it.
So as this person gets their feet underneath them, they definitely have an eye on accommodating, accommodating, potentially increased research activities under our R1 status. Of course, keeping in mind that funding uncertainty and dealing with a flat budget as potentially those subscription costs rise with that status change. So our collections budget, of course, is funded through research revenue.
And if this means less research activity and a tighter research budget, you know, overhead slashed, it will create a pretty difficult budget situation for us. So we're keeping an eye on the situation. We don't really have a lot of information past this fiscal year, but we're hopeful that ash is going to be doing everything he can to ease us through any, any difficulties that we have moving forward.
Great I'm glad that you have a new member of the team to take on that burden a little bit. Let's go to Michael. Yeah so I already mentioned we're, we're under we're going under budget cuts at the University of Denver. And again, 5% cut to the overall library budget in the fiscal year 25, which we're about to end, and another 5% in fiscal year 26.
We've chosen to take that from the collections budget and to protect positions. And when I talk to colleagues around the country, that's what they're saying as well. Right there. When you when they have a choice, when the University doesn't specifically allocate money to one or the other pool, and they have the opportunity to decide how to, how to fund the library as a whole.
They're choosing to protect positions at, at the expense of collections. We're seeing 10% cuts at the University of Denver. And I, I think that we should all be expecting that there will be 10% or so collections across the entire R1 and R2 landscape, at least. And, you know, so I was talking to a colleague who's the University librarian at an Ivy League institution the other day.
She said that she's seeing roughly 5% to 10% cuts coming in the next year, and she thinks she's in a better position than most of her Ivy League colleagues. So I think it's pretty dire. And and I don't think it's, we've been talking about what? Not being able to afford our subscriptions for years. Right we've the serials crisis started before I became a librarian 25 years ago, but we still talk about it.
But at the University of Denver, we are finally at the point where we are breaking apart our big deals. We've already set in place the breaking apart of our Elsevier deal. We are. I've got meetings with two of the other large publishers at ala this weekend, and we'll be talking to all of them about cutting apart our deals. Like like Charles, we, we're trying to lean in as much as possible on collaboration with partners in the various consortia consortia that we were part of, the greater Western library alliance and the Colorado alliance of Research Libraries.
Most importantly. But I think everybody in those consortia is facing budget cuts. And so our ability to collaborate is less than it was a year or two ago. It's pretty dire, I think. Yeah, I agree with that. And I find it interesting that all of your organizations are kind of taking almost a people first initiative, prioritizing someone's position over New collection development.
And I think in our current political climate, that is a form of resistance when you think about it too. So we mentioned we talked a little bit about collection development. So let's talk a little bit more about transformative agreements. What's the view on these agreements currently and how are you going to work on them going forward. And what's the best kind of future idealized view of transformative agreements.
Do you want to jump in again, Michael. Sure so I'll start by saying that I've been skeptical of the idea of transformative agreements from the beginning. Write the idea that they will actually transform anything. I'm not sure when we get to the point where things have actually transformed. If you essentially are creating a bigger big deal. That said, we're participating in several because I wanted to try them out and see what happens.
And I, I, you know, I don't think that it's fair to criticize something if you don't, you know, give it a chance to work. But we're also breaking apart our big deals. And we have a transformative agreement with Elsevier. And we're going to break apart the Elsevier big deal, which means that we're going to break apart. We're we're going to give up that transformative agreement. And I don't I don't know what the right answer is there.
I, I want to continue to support open access publishing. I want to I think it's the future that we need. I think especially given declining budgets for collections. There's even more need for it than before. And yet the lever of using your subscription to help support open access is going. That's a my metaphor didn't work because I said the lever but.
Right but that we're declining pretty rapidly in what we can afford to put into support of open access. And if the Office of Research and Sponsored programs is going to be contributing to it, their dollars are declining as overhead dollars from grants go away as well. So I'm not very optimistic. But maybe maybe this gives us a chance to explore other models of open access that we haven't even thought of yet.
And Charles, you had mentioned transformative agreements briefly in our last section on collection development. Do you have anything to add. Yeah So last year, we did a campus survey just to find out how faculty were thinking about various things related to the library, including open access. And one of the things that was very clear is that the vast majority of our faculty who responded are involved in open access.
So 80% had either published in open access or were planning to the same kind of proportion of were really struggling to work out where to get the funding, and they were finding the overhead of figuring that out really bit into their kind of research time. And so on. So transformative agreements do help with that, and faculty do find it popular and are really used taking or making use of those.
I mean, we see surges in publisher, you know, people actually going to a particular publisher once a transformative agreement is signed, which of course, as a library makes us a little bit nervous because that is kind of making the rich richer, right? I mean, it makes the Wiley's, et cetera, those who are able to cope with the complexity, it increases their share of the pie. So we're really wrestling with that question of meeting a faculty need versus doing following our values with transformative agreements.
I think we haven't quite found the right balance yet, but something that we're definitely doing is we're putting in place many more systems around making decisions. And certainly with open access, we are creating a rubric that many other R1 and other institutions have created. Now a rubric for evaluating new open access investment decisions, which actually creates some weighting for more bibliodiversity for really supporting smaller publishers, supporting independent publishers.
And I think that's really important. And I think also that scrutiny. So we've created a new collections steering group as well for big ticket decisions and big issues. So that scrutiny and just being a lot more careful with our money in general. And just really doubling down on fiscal responsibility, is also an overarching feature of what we're doing at the moment.
All right. That is a very good point about making the rich richer. One thing that always comes up in discussions of open access is there's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone will pay, someone has to pay somewhere, and the discussion comes down. Well, who is going to pay. Is it the libraries.
Is it the researchers, the readers that really comes down to it in the end. Anyways, I'm curious what your thoughts are. My perspective really echoes everything Charles and Michael have said. We really value publishing open access, but at the end of the day, what funds are going to be available for that. We need to support the teaching and research needs of our University.
And though our collections librarian is going through a process right now to see if our collections policy can be updated, that definitely isn't going to change. So finding that right balance, as my fellow panelists have already noted, is really important. How do we continue our mission in that and also, you know, continue to show that we support publishing open access. And it's going to be really difficult with a flat budget or, you know, budget cuts moving forward.
One question that my fellow librarians have in going into transformative agreements has to do with what work goes into that for the institution staff. Because we are a small institution and our staff is small but mighty. But any additional work that is required of us, we need to think very critically about who is doing that and what time commitment that will take.
So also a really critical factor that we need to consider when going into transformative agreements. OK and speaking of transformation and a kind of more general, wider sense, let's talk about how the role of the library is changing or evolving in terms of teaching and learning. I could jump in here for a little bit. So my institution, Excelsior University, is completely online.
We serve mostly older students. Non-traditional students, first time college attenders. And so what I've noticed in general with how the role of the library is changing, is that with this push for the use of open access, particularly open educational resources, and changing courses into 0 textbook course, zero textbook cost courses, instead of maybe some other textbook textbook affordability deals or programs.
There's this kind of new philosophical shift, I think, where we're seeing students not just as learners, but we're seeing students as customers. We want to give them the best deal for their money because what do customers have. Customers have choices. So at the end of the day, you want your customer, your student to choose your institution. And I think with this kind of switch to more open things, that is great.
That will get students to come to your institution. But of course, when we're seeing students as customers, the role of the library changes a little bit more in the sense that we're not just helping students with their research. Helping faculty with their research, too. We are in customer service, too. And so I'm curious what everyone's thoughts are. And at least you want to jump in and talk about how you think the role of the library is changing in this kind of teaching and learning bubble.
Sure, Yeah. The Van Pelt NLP library is increasingly interested in supporting affordable and accessible course materials. As an expert in open educational resources, I support the community in that respect, consulting in how instructors can choose or create different open resources in the classroom. And that role is represented on our University standing committee, which I chair the committee for accessible and Affordable Learning materials, which is a committee that shows just how important accessibility and affordability is to Michigan Tech as a whole.
That group is made up of a broad swath of Representatives from across the University, and has really helped build ties between our Center for Teaching and Learning and campus store. So we've started a project on campus, the textbook affordability project, with our campus store. They provide us a list of adopted titles every semester, and the library goes through that to see what titles are available through the library, so that we can highlight those for students and they can make choices based on what works for them.
Whether a library, copy, print or electronic is going to be sufficient or an option at any point. So in developing that project, we've also been looking at what titles we may be able to select and actually purchase for our collections, because we've had a position historically that we do not purchase textbooks, period. We've been easing up on that a little bit when we get requests, if we have it in our monographs budget, which is not huge.
We could potentially buy a print copy or an electronic copy upon request. So with our new collections person in place, we will be reviewing this list of titles from the campus store to see, especially for high enrollment courses, what texts we might be able to purchase. We have done a review for that for our highest enrollment courses, and found that we were not able to purchase anything based on the licenses that we were interested in.
Unlimited see perpetual licensing. And as we hear that publishers maybe change those policies where we're really paying attention to that for sure. Our Instruction Team is busy building stronger relationships with many departments across campus. So definitely involved in that area. They are really doing a lot of work.
So I mentioned, we don't have subject librarians. We're functional specialists. We we don't see ourselves as experts in any specific field. So they do a lot of work getting to know the different resources that they use in classrooms. But they're not experts in the courses that they go into. So we're very dependent on the metadata that publishers provide to us to help these students, who are also not experts, to navigate these resources and teach them how to use them.
So making sure that the metadata provided in those databases is accurate and can be used for the lessons that they have in mind, is really important. And I think that's about it. I I'll pass the mic at the moment. OK we can pass it on to Michael. Sure Yeah. Thank you. And Anneliese mentioned the fact that of like we don't do textbooks is a pretty common message that you hear from libraries in terms of collection development.
And we've always said that here. And I've realized over the last decade or so, as OER has become more of an emphasis for institutions, that it was a really big mistake for libraries, I think. I think saying we don't do textbooks is implying that we don't do teaching and learning, and that all we're here for is research. Right and that's never been true.
But it seems like that's the message we're sending. And so I'm, you know, we've been trying to be more intentional on how we think. We're still not buying a lot of textbooks, partly because the textbook model is badly broken. And we certainly can't afford to buy a new edition every other year when it's just a new edition to keep the used market at Bay. Right but but we are buying more textbooks and we are.
We're trying to work more closely on getting our faculty to understand that the licensed resources that we have are essentially free to their students. We've done some support on OER. I was on the Colorado OER council for several years. This this is a council that's part of its statutory council. It's part of the Department of Higher Education. It provides $1 million in funding annually to the public institutions in the state to flip over toward OER.
And, you know, I was there as a private institution representative and couldn't receive any of the money. But it was interesting to see how much of the OER work on the public campuses in Colorado is being driven by, by librarians, and this goes from community colleges up to the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Colorado State University, the two big ones. So I think that's really encouraging.
And I and I and I think that we should be thinking more about supporting course materials. The other just the one other thought before I turn it over to Charles is that, that. We've been approached in libraries for years by companies like Clarivate and Elsevier to help fund tools to support research.
And there's always this tricky navigation with the Office of Research about who supports that. More and more recently, we've been or at least I've been getting approached by companies small, often small startup companies that have really interesting teaching and learning tools. And I'm having those similar conversations with our Office of Teaching and learning. Right so there are these tools and often these new interesting applications of AI.
And just like these research support tools, they there isn't an obvious place for them on campus. And people are coming to the library. But I'm saying I can't cover that because I don't have a budget for it. So just a thought about and maybe it's worth talking about a little bit when we get into conversation about AI.
Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah go ahead Charles. Yeah that's a really interesting point that Michael makes I mean. So one of the what I, I always feel very, very sorry for anybody trying to sell anything to the University of Michigan because it's such a distributed entity that it's hard enough when you're inside it to know who to talk to about getting an investment in something.
And so navigating it from the outside is kind of a nightmare. And it is really hard when you see these really interesting looking initiatives, things like the Scylla initiative, where looking at ways of analyzing curricula to identify potentially good substitutes for, you know, expensive textbooks and things like that. It's really difficult to know where to point people like that because the library is not really the right, quite the right place for evaluating.
We don't have good ways of evaluating those things, which are essentially software tools. So anyhow, that is a really interesting point that Michael makes. I mean, we don't have an awful lot happening on as a library on the textbook teaching and Learning Resource space that is mainly happening at the college levels. And there's quite a lot of opacity about what is happening in each college.
I will say that we are seeing more and more use when we look at usage stats of licensed resources, like articles and chapters that we're licensing for research. What we thought we were licensing for research purposes, being actually used and assigned to courses. And that's something that's quite striking. And it's not necessarily just at the upper level courses. It's also happening as faculty members try and sort of maybe redesign their courses a little bit to expose students to real to sort of primary source materials.
I mean, real research articles and so on. Earlier in the experience. And there are some initiatives on campus that are really looking at foundational courses. So there's really, really big courses with multi sections. And one of the things they're looking at is how to redesign those in ways that are not so reliant on having a single textbook, for example. So that's an interesting thing that's happening.
And I think, you know, some of the things that publishers produce, and especially those that they make available DRM free, that they were thinking were primarily for researchers, you may be starting to see interesting spikes in usage, which suggests that there's this alternative audience for those types of materials, and those would be students using them in courses.
Yeah Thank you so much for that. Before we move on to a different topic, I want to open it up to the group. So please feel free to chime in. What more would you like publishers to know about the needs of your libraries, your students, faculty where publishers are involved. What would help you do your job more effectively. So please feel free to jump in.
Yeah I'll chime in first. I think just keeping in mind our budget difficulties is first and foremost for us. You know, we might have a flat budget, but that in reality means that we will have to cut resources. And if things become even more expensive because of that R1 status, it's going to be even worse for us. I think that in thinking about the accelerated NIH public access policy, I have an eye on how that is going to impact our community.
I do expect a lot of questions when faculty come back after the summer. And essentially what that policy states is that researchers who have NIH funds need to submit their accepted manuscript into PMC by the time the publisher that they have submitted to makes their copy available. So what happens with that situation and any licensing implications might be difficult for our community to navigate.
So the library is standing ready to help with any of those issues. And hopefully publishers will be understanding of that policy change, which is just right around the corner. At that at this point. I mentioned textbook purchasing earlier. There have. There's been at least one publisher that has amended how libraries are able to purchase.
Ebooks we definitely have an interest in that. So, you know, Thank you for those who are thinking of libraries and amending those policies to make it more make it easier for us to get unlimited seat perpetual access licenses. I think those are three big areas that we can say that we're hoping publishers have an eye on. And we also are very interested in how publishers are navigating the title.
Two update according to accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act, we're hoping for some transparency as that deadline for compliance comes closer, because we want and need to make sure that all of the Materials that we provide are going to be accessible under that requirement. Oh, Thank you, Charles and Michael, do you have anything to add before we move on to our final discussion of I just plus 1 to both of those points, two of those points that anneliese made.
Just the navigational bit is really tough for faculty. I mean, there's a lot of extra complexity. And one of the things is, you know, however good a publisher's own kind of educational materials are, the reality is that faculty aren't going to want to look at publisher BI Publisher, BI Publisher, BI Publisher. They really kind of need that central source of help with navigation of things like how does what are my options around APCs, for example.
So really helping libraries to with information that will make it easy for them to communicate through LibGuides or whatever. How how to think about these kind of complex questions across multiple publishers. That's really useful. The also plus 1 for the ADA Title. Two as public universities, that's very, very big on our campuses.
And April 2026 does not seem a long time away. A couple of other things in the student area, we're seeing a lot more use of audio around research. I mean, I know that, you know, audio versions of research articles and research books can be quite tricky. And this may feed into our AI conversation, but we are seeing students using those audio versions of research materials more and more.
And that's a really interesting thing to watch. And then the other thing is we're all in it together at the moment in terms of trying to tell why tell the story of why research matters to everyday, to people in their everyday work. And I think that's going to be an area that we can all collaborate on and have to. I think there's a major feeling at University of Michigan that we haven't done a good job of telling the story of research in terms of how it impacts me, like, what is the benefit for me as an individual of the work that you over in that University do.
We've tended to tell the story in terms of our own successes, rather than the successes of people who benefit from research, and that would be higher education in general, not just the research activities. So anything we can do together to tell the story of why investments in research and in high quality teaching matter that will be really good for collaboration. OK Thank you both.
Michael, did you have anything to add in the interest of time, I do want us to talk a little bit about AI before we open up for questions. Yeah, I'll just add some one. One quick point. You know, I've been thinking a lot and I've actually been speaking at conferences a lot about one step further from what Charles ended with that. Libraries don't do a very good job of explaining our value to our administrations.
And anything that publishers can do to help us tell that story would be really helpful. So being able to talk to our provosts and our board of trustees and whoever it is, whoever else is responsible for funding the library and explaining not that this article gets used a lot, but what does that mean. That this article gets used a lot. So how do we tell the story of the value of the library in educating our students and in helping the University fulfill its mission.
OK, so we cannot leave today without talking about AI. So just really quick, let's talk a little bit about this giant elf in the room, which is AI. How has AI impacted your library already. How can you see it factoring into your services in the future and can prompt. Can publishers actually help with this. Charles, do you want to go first.
And then we could go with Michael and Anneliese before opening for questions. Yeah so on the training, on the educational side, lots and lots of concerns among faculty about how this is influencing student education. At the library end, we need a way of being able to know if an AI tool is embedded in a publisher product and a way of turning it off if faculty get really complaining.
On the research side, actually, there's a lot of interest and demand for access to content for AI training. So we have a very strong data science, computing programs and license agreements that would allow us to have some kind of non-commercial access to that content would be extremely popular and extremely helpful. So just looking at license agreements and thinking about how the text and data mining clause might be expanded would be very helpful indeed.
Michael did you. Oh, Yeah. Go ahead. I'll just jump in. Right? Yeah. So similar concerns at my institution about teaching and how people are using how students, especially are using AI.
There's I think a pretty deep concern about. Unintentional use of AI and what we can do to mitigate that. I'm a little concerned about the fact that, that so many publishers are investing in, in AI tools. Which is great on some level. There are ethical issues. There are issues about needing to turn it off, but there's also just a practical issue of how do we afford this.
I, I was on the advisory board for or an advisory board meeting for a publisher earlier this week, and they demonstrated some really amazing AI tools that they're creating. This is a very large publisher. Their intent is to sell these tools to us. I can't afford none of us can afford to buy sort of an I add on every publisher platform. None of us is particularly interested, probably in a publisher specific AI tool.
And yet. It's probably inevitable that we're going to be having AI as a sort of discovery enhancement piece on every platform we have. And we need to think about that as something that is not an extra cost. I'm there are lots of tools that are AI specific that can do new things that can analyze text in ways that wasn't possible before.
That that can help with understanding and having a conversation around the text that are really interesting for teaching and learning. Those things we probably will want to invest in and come up with new money for. But that's very different than just plain, just sort of bells and whistles around discovery. And, and I just think that if any publishers are thinking that there's going to be money to be made on adding AI to the discovery.
I don't think there is. I had one more point, but it's gone and I'll stop because we're running out of time. Before we move to questions, I know. Lisa, do you have anything you wanted to add. Yeah I'll just quickly add that Charles, we're kind of in the same boat at Michigan Tech, where we do have courses that are creating AI tools as part of their coursework.
So we would like to make sure that there is, the information available for them to do that. And if publishers are just putting blanket statements on their content that I cannot be used, you know, how widespread is that going to be. And how would that impact the instruction and learning happening at the university? Another point is supporting authors who would like to publish open access or with Creative Commons license, but don't necessarily want their content to be used for AI.
And in just a couple of minutes, Creative Commons has a webinar that we'll be covering this issue. The C signals licenses that hopefully will indicate an author's desire or not, for their content to be used in that way. OK, Thank you so much. And I will turn it over to Lori so we can answer some questions. Sure so just I'm going to combine two questions.
They're sort of related in the interest of time. We had a question about subscribe to open as an approach and how that might work with the challenges you shared about transformative agreements. And another question on a small publisher who may have been doing a lot of enhancements may also be under economic pressures. We're looking to raise their rates going forward to because of the changes that they've made.
You know, how can publishers approach these different issues, these different models in a climate, as you've as you've discussed. I can jump in on the Subscribe to OpenAI part of it. And I'll try to be really quick. So first of all, I think it's a really intriguing model and has some real strengths. And it works as long as that whatever you're paying for to whatever you're subscribing to fits within your budget, there's a little bit of a free rider concern if there's enough subscription that people don't need to continue to subscribe to it.
And then there's a slightly different concern in that transformative agreements help the authors at my institution make their articles open. Subscribe to open. Makes articles open. But it doesn't necessarily help my authors and I need something that does both.
Great Thank you. I think on that second question, this is a tough time to be selling new products or raising prices substantially to try and recoup on prices, but I think libraries do really care about small publishers and wanting them to succeed. And I think total transparency is the best approach really coming and saying, look, here's the deal. We're really trying to do this thing.
We're listening to you as we do it. And when we do this price raising, it's not. It's to actually recoup the costs of our investments and here's how much our investments cost. I mean, as more transparency and the more emphasis on really listening and being a good communicator. I think will help a lot. That's great. Thank you.
Thank you. Charles all right. Well, we have reached the end of our hour. This has been a fantastic discussion. Thank you to all of our panelists and everybody participating today for sharing their time and expertise. We encourage attendees to provide feedback on today's webinar and provide suggestions for future webinars.
Please complete the evaluation form. You can scan. You can reach the forum by scanning the QR code that we're showing on the screen right now, or the evaluation link you will receive at the conclusion of this event. Thanks again to our sponsors, Silverchair and access innovations. Today's webinar was recorded. All registrants will be sent a link of the recording when it's posted on the SSP website.
And that concludes our session today. Thank you everyone. This has been wonderful.
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