© Copyright 2026 Mastersinlibraryscience.org.
Funding, policy, and training gaps, plus the library roles that move open research forward
Academic libraries have become the default campus home for open access publishing, data curation, and public access compliance. The work expands faster than the budget line. A 2025 FACETS review of 3,752 publications from 2010 through 2024 found the barriers are operational more often than ideological: inconsistent funding, fragmented policy, and thin infrastructure.
For scholarly communication and liaison librarians, that gap means open science work frequently lands as an add-on to existing duties, not a funded specialization. The practical pathways are repository operations, APC coordination, and researcher training, but they depend on institutional capacity rather than individual effort.
Open access is the narrowest piece: free online availability of published articles and books. Open scholarship extends that boundary to include data, code, preprints, open peer review, and open educational resources. Open science leans toward STEM and data-driven research workflows, while open scholarship also covers humanities and social science outputs, publishing practices, and participatory research. Open science often includes citizen science and replication data; open scholarship adds discipline-specific norms in arts and humanities.
Libraries operate at different points in each frame. Licensing staff negotiate open access provisions in journal agreements. Repository teams manage preprints, theses, and datasets. Data services librarians build data management plans and support reproducible workflows, aligning with open science. Library publishers host open journals and monographs. Scholarly communication librarians provide training on choosing licenses, depositing work, and meeting funder requirements.
At the practical level, libraries rarely police the terminology. They use whichever term funders or campus partners expect, then route support to the same underlying services: repositories, publishing, and training. Open access basics are covered elsewhere on the site; the focus here is the wider open scholarship and open science work academic librarians now do. For prospective MLIS students, the practical difference matters less than the skills: repository workflows, data stewardship, licensing, and public access compliance.
Academic libraries are being asked to support a widening set of open research practices, but local staffing, training, and policy capacity have not always kept pace. A 2025 systematized literature review examined 3,752 publications from 2010 through 2024 to map how U.S. academic libraries engage with open scholarship. Unlike a primary survey, the study reflects documented activity across the published record.
The review identified nine activity domains.1 Among the most visible in the published literature are open access, open data, digital tools and infrastructure, research data support, citizen science, open peer review, and open innovation.
Libraries showed the strongest engagement in open access, digital tools and infrastructure, and research data support. In practice, that includes running online data storage and publishing platforms, guiding researchers on data collection, storage, and sharing, and maintaining institutional or disciplinary repositories.
Citizen science, which involves public participation in research, and open peer review, which increases transparency in the review process, received the least support. The gap is notable because both areas require coordination beyond the library's walls and are less likely to have dedicated staffing. The review also flagged ongoing professional development as an urgent need. As open research becomes more technical and collaborative, librarians without sustained training risk burnout or underdelivery. The study's underlying data are openly available on OSF.
For prospective academic librarians, these findings suggest that open access and data skills remain the most common entry points, while citizen science and open peer review offer room for specialization. The review reinforces that open scholarship support is no longer a niche service but a core library function that needs sustained investment.
What actually stops an academic library from launching a full open-science service? The most frequent answers are not ideological; they are operational: budget, staffing, policy fragmentation, and technical infrastructure.
A faculty-workflow survey found 69% of academic libraries named limited funding as a challenge.1 Among 282 scholarly communication workers, 74.79% said they managed no dedicated budget, and 52.1% did not feel appropriately resourced. UK library staff echoed this: 76% called the lack of funding opportunities significant.
Limited staff was even more common at 82%. Research data services often operate with 0 to 3.5 dedicated FTE and an average of 1.3 dedicated FTE, while total research data services staff averaged 3.58. Repositories are thinner still: 60% of academic health sciences libraries had one or fewer full-time repository staff, zero was the most frequent answer, and 71.4% of libraries deposited works on behalf of users.2 Only 17% of libraries had dedicated staff for funding support and 25% for research data services; liaison librarians carried 44% and 34% of those duties.
Policy fragmentation shows up as overlapping institutional, funder, and professional standards, not one clear framework. On the technical side, more than 85% of repositories accepted research data in 2018, and 70% used a single repository for data and other materials, but availability is not adequacy. Storage, preservation, metadata, security, and recurring maintenance all require separate funding and staff.
These barriers compound: a stretched budget feeds thin staffing, and thin staffing stalls policy and infrastructure work. The easiest first move is usually not new software; it is policy documentation and faculty-facing deposit and data-management guidance, which use existing staff time. A realistic small service needs roughly 1.50 dedicated FTE plus repository, data-sharing, DMP, and preservation platforms, with recurring storage and maintenance costs.
The evidence points to a capacity gap, not an interest gap: academic librarians already see open science as core to their mission, but they lack the dedicated staffing, funding, and policy support to move it forward.
These roles split open research work across outreach, policy, repository operations, data curation, and researcher training rather than resting on a single position. Open peer review and citizen science support are less formalized; libraries can start small by sharing open review workflows and pointing researchers to open-access citizen science journals such as Citizen Science: Theory and Practice.
| Role / Job Title | What They Do for Open Research | Typical Qualifications |
|---|---|---|
| Scholarly Communications Librarian | Advises on open access, scholarly profiles and identifiers such as ORCID, research data management, metrics, citation improvement, and responsible research assessment; consults with faculty and administrators on open research practices; collaborates on institutional repository stewardship. | Excellent oral and written communication skills and excellent interpersonal skills, including the ability to explain complex ideas clearly and work in diverse environments. |
| Research Data Librarian | Provides consultations on data management plans, metadata, storage, sharing, preservation, and repository selection; supports funder, publisher, and institutional data-sharing requirements; assists with dataset ingestion, curation, and institutional-repository management. | Experience supporting qualitative or quantitative research; familiarity with FAIR, CARE, and data-curation practices; and experience with research data repositories, metadata, or data-discovery systems. |
| Digital Publishing and Repository Librarian | Manages and maintains the institutional repository and open-journal publishing program; coordinates repository and open-access journal services; supports open-access-policy compliance; answers questions about repositories, open journals, and open dissemination; collaborates on initiatives advancing open access to university research. | Master's degree from an ALA-accredited library/information-science program or equivalent; experience with digital-publishing tools such as DSpace or OJS; broad knowledge of scholarly communication; collaboration and problem-solving skills; commitment to open knowledge, open access, or open research. |
| Open Scholarship Librarian | Supports the scholarly communication lifecycle from content creation through preservation, rights management, discovery, and dissemination; develops outreach and education for digital publishing and repository services; promotes open-access tools including institutional repositories, ORCID, and DOIs; supports digital-collection and publishing workflows; teaches rights and access issues. | Academic or professional experience with scholarly communication principles and practices, including copyright and fair use, open access, digital publishing, and repository management. |
| Scholarly Communications and Analytics Librarian | Develops and maintains an institutional digital repository for scholarship, research data, and teaching resources; processes and describes items; consults on research-data management, preservation, dissemination mandates, open scholarship, publication portfolios, metrics, and author identifiers. | Master's degree (MLIS, MLS, or MS) from an ALA-accredited program, or a master's degree from a regionally accredited college or university plus at least 3 years of full-time academic-library or archive experience. |
| Director of Research and Teaching Environment | Leads services for managing and sharing research outputs, including data, articles, reports, theses, and dissertations; oversees data-management planning, curation, sharing, storage, and preservation; supports institutional repositories, journal hosting, persistent identifiers, and open-scholarship services; coordinates IT, preservation, metadata, copyright, and public-service support. | Master's degree in library/information science or another relevant discipline and at least 5 years of experience in research data services, open scholarship, or closely related fields; in-depth knowledge of research-data curation, management, sharing, preservation, open access, and scholarly communication. |
What training actually closes the gap between library school and open-science work, and where can a new liaison start without enrolling in a full certificate?
The gap runs both ways. Librarians often arrive in scholarly communication roles with limited grounding in research data management, licensing, metadata standards, and public-access policy. Faculty and researchers, for their part, may not know which repository fits a dataset or preprint, or how an institution's open-access agreements change article processing charge decisions. A liaison who can translate between those needs is the practical fix.
These workshops pair cleanly with MLIS electives in research data services, scholarly publishing, metadata, and digital preservation. Before committing to a longer certificate, an early-career librarian can take one free NNLM course or an ACRL Scholarly Communication webcast this year, then use the MLIS program and library careers guides on mastersinlibraryscience.org to compare concentrations that support this work. Even one focused workshop can make the difference between a liaison who only answers questions and one who helps shape open-research support.
US academic libraries generally cite an average article processing charge above $2,100 and a median around $2,000, but published guidance does not separate that figure into fully open access and hybrid journal rates. Fully OA journals charge on every accepted article because they have no subscription revenue, while hybrid journals combine subscription access with optional paid open access. In 2026, some publisher terms are conditional: ACS lists $1,500 for a CC BY-NC-ND license and $2,000 for CC BY, with a $250 premium member discount.1 Several institutional agreements waive or discount those charges, but the terms vary by contract rather than forming a stable market range.
Eligibility usually requires an institutional affiliation plus corresponding or lead author status, and verification often happens at acceptance rather than submission. Penn State requires a Penn State corresponding author; CSU requires a CSU-employed corresponding author and an included journal; UAB covers qualifying articles when the lead or corresponding author is UAB-affiliated. Annual caps also apply, such as Penn State's Taylor & Francis cap of 220 articles in 2026.2 Savings are measured as total APC costs covered or waived: UAB reports more than $2.5 million in agreement savings from 2021 through 2025 across 4,000 journals. Fully OA journals do not offer a no-fee subscription fallback after a quota is reached, so checking the agreement list early matters.
Before paying out of pocket, check the agreement list for your journal, corresponding author status, and annual cap.
Choosing where to deposit research is not about prestige. The right fit depends on preservation commitments, metadata support, default licensing, and intended audience. Institutional repositories often serve campus-related outputs, while disciplinary and general repositories can offer different strengths for preprints, data, and code.
| Repository Type | Examples | Preservation | Licensing and Cost | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Institutional repositories | Repositories operated by universities and research institutions; no single universal platform dominates | Preservation commitments vary across institutions; no single universal policy is identified | Usually free to deposit for campus affiliates; licensing terms vary by repository and institution | Campus-affiliated outputs, including theses, dissertations, faculty articles, and grey literature |
| Disciplinary preprint server | bioRxiv | All bioRxiv papers are archived at Portico | No fee to submit articles; provides free and unrestricted access to posted articles | Life-science manuscripts shared as preprints |
| General-purpose repository | Zenodo | Free, general-purpose repository hosted by CERN; permanent DOI assignment rather than a separately specified preservation policy | Free for researchers, communities, and institutional-login integration | Any research output type, including data, code, images, and other research outputs |
| General repository | Dryad | Content publicly viewable and downloadable with a persistent DOI; no separate preservation duration stated | All content available under CC0 and free to access; deposit costs little to nothing where an institutional membership applies | Research data underlying published findings, especially datasets accompanying a journal article |
| General repository | OSF | Existing OSF content will continue to be hosted, and public content with DOIs will continue to be accessible through those DOIs | OSF is free; beginning February 19, 2027, all OSF projects will be converted into read-only projects, while project materials and DOI identifiers will continue to be accessible | Sharing data, materials, and code |
US federal public access has shifted from a patchwork of embargo windows to an immediate-access default, and academic libraries now carry much of the compliance workload. The 2022 OSTP public access memo, often called the Nelson memo, applies to every federal agency and requires publications and supporting data to be shared without an embargo. Agency publication and data policies were due in effect by December 31, 2025.1 As of 2026, the next federal milestones are metadata implementation plans due December 31, 2026, and persistent identifier policies that take effect no later than one year after those plans are published.1
NIH's revised public access policy removes the former 12-month embargo for author-accepted manuscripts accepted on or after July 1, 2025, depositing them in PubMed Central at official publication. NSF's updated policy applies to awards beginning December 8, 2025 and January 22, 2026, requiring journal articles in the NSF Public Access Repository with machine-readable metadata and persistent identifiers, and data sharing at no more than incremental cost. For libraries, these rules translate into repository deposit support, data management plan review, and guidance on article processing charge allowances or read-and-publish agreements.
Consortia can stretch limited budgets by negotiating shared read-and-publish agreements, joint repository infrastructure, and coordinated compliance training, reducing the need for each campus to build workflows alone.
Libraries can act now by creating agency-specific deposit checklists, embedding data management plan review into grant submission workflows, and using consortium agreements to cover article processing charges and repository costs.
