The Open & Sustainable Scholarly Communication Advisory Committee (OSSC) has established a formal set of principles that outline the University’s commitment to open scholarship, which was approved by Faculty Senate. These principles guide our regular negotiations with publishers and vendors. To that end, we have:

• Defined OSU's commitment to open scholarship.
• Developed a set of reasonable principles that position OSU librarians to negotiate aggressively with publishers to secure licensing agreements that benefit OSU researchers.
• Continued to seek the support of OSU faculty to use these terms and conditions in negotiating access to scholarly communication.

In spring 2019 OSU Provost Ed Feser asked the University Librarian Faye A. Chadwell and Susan Capalbo, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs, to establish a committee to engage the OSU community in discussions regarding sustainable access to scholarly communication.

The committee was established in consultation with the Faculty Senate Library Committee (FSLC) Chair at the end of 2019 and began meetings in early Spring 2020.

The OSSC Library Committee members include:

• Anne-Marie Deitering, Delpha and Donald Campbell Dean of Libraries
• Kerri Goergen-Doll, Interim Associate University Librarian, Resource Acquisition and Sharing Director
• Michael Boock, Scholarly Communication Librarian
• Zach Welhouse, Online Learning Librarian
• CJ Garcia, Diversity Scholar

The OSSC Faculty Advisory Committee members include:

• Marit Bovbjerg, Assistant Professor, College of Public Health and Human Sciences. FSLC member.
• Melissa Santala, Assistant Professor, Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering
• Brian Sidlauskas, Associate Professor, College of Agricultural Sciences. FSLC member.
• Nadia Streletskaya, Assistant Professor, College of Agricultural Sciences
• David Rupp, Assistant Professor, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
• Julie Penry, Ex-officio, Assistant General Counsel

Special thanks to former members:

• Kyle Niemeyer, Associate Professor, Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering (2019 - 2022).
• Melissa Haendel, Director of Translational Data Science, Linus Pauling Institute. FSLC member (2019 - 2021).
• Emily Shroyer, Associate Professor, College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (2019 - 2021).

Journal and database subscriptions account for an overwhelming majority of the OSU Libraries collections budget. Subscription costs continue to rise at an unsustainable rate, affecting the Libraries’ ability to acquire other resources needed to support teaching, research, and learning.

In addition to these unsustainable subscription costs, since 2015 OSU authors (or their co-authors at other institutions) have paid approximately $1 million to the same publishers so that their research is open access and available to researchers, students, instructors, and practitioners around the world. 

Publisher data from SPARC analysis:

Subscription costs as a whole are unsustainable. Moreover, OSU faculty and the Libraries are increasingly paying the same publishers twice to both subscribe to journals and enable open access to research published there. We need to create a strong, united message that Oregon State University is dedicated to open scholarly communication and expects to only pay once.