Érudit is excited to welcome two new partner libraries, KU Leuven and UiT The Arctic University of Norway, to the Partnership for Open Access (POA) for 2026. To highlight this occasion, we asked Demmy Verbeke, head of Artes at KU Leuven Libraries, and Per Pippin Aspaas, Senior Academic Librarian at UiT, a few questions about what their contributions to the POA says about their institutions’ commitments to open access and open science.
1. Please tell us a little bit about how your libraries invest in open access and how that has developed over the years.
Demmy Verbeke (DV): In 2018, KU Leuven Libraries decided to invest in open publishing next to all our work on Green Open Access. However, we decided to target our investments on non-profit and values-aligned initiatives, not only because we felt that such investments deserved priority but also because we saw a need to safeguard diversity (both in business models and scholarly communities served) and foster innovation in scholarly communication. As a result, we not only support OA content as such (journals, books, OA publishers and platforms) but also infrastructures and initiatives such as DOAB/OAPEN or PeerCommunityIn.
Per Pippin Aspaas (PPA): Since 2003, the library of UiT has been running an OJS-based platform for peer-reviewed journals and series. The library supports the running of these publications, all of which are Diamond Open Access and closely affiliated with UiT, with in-kind support. We have also been running an institutional repository for Green Open Access for many years back. Author Accepted Manuscripts, MA and PhD theses, and other outputs all go into this repository, which is curated by staff at the library. All of this is traditional institutional service provision – but we found ourselves asking “is it enough?” Through the years, a very modest proportion of our Literature Acquisition Budget has been spent on voluntary donations to international platforms and other infrastructures for Diamond Open Access, such as Open Library of Humanities, SciPost, Open Book Collective, DOAJ. Seeing the surge of interest in Diamond Open Access, we are now multiplying these commitments.
2. How do you gather institutional support for open access investments? What tensions do you encounter? What, in your experience, helps convince your reticent or skeptical colleagues?
PPA: When deciding to boost our investment in Diamond Open Access, we needed to string together a strategy based on three elements: national guidelines, budget situation, and publishing statistics. There is a national strategy for research publishing in Norway that singles out Diamond Open Access as a field in need of more support. Expensive Publish-and-Read deals with the major commercial publishers are a hindrance to this much-longed-for investment. However, at the beginning of 2025 it became clear that the deal with Wiley would be cancelled and the deal with Elsevier would be signed with a 25% cost reduction. These changes made substantial funds available to the Literature Acquisition Committee of our institution to invest in Diamond. As for publishing statistics, we are helped by a CRIS system that monitors publishing habits of researchers affiliated with all the various institutions in the country. The publishing habits of our researchers shows a 6% rate in the use of Diamond outlets. Therefore, the Literature Acquisition Committee, with the unanimous support of the Library Steering Board, decided to spend at least 6% of our budget on Diamond from now on.
DV: We are lucky enough to get ongoing funding for a designated KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access. Put in place in 2018, this fund is managed by the library, to be spent exclusively on open investments. More recently, discipline-specific library units are also moving small parts of their collection budgets traditionally spent on paywalled material towards investments in OA. The speed and size varies, mainly due to disciplinary differences in collection decisions. But a lot of colleagues are quickly convinced once they learn how much we can do by rethinking spending priorities even for just a fraction of the total budget and when they see that the main goal is to put academic authors back in control of the dissemination of their own work.
3. What about the POA struck you as a worthwhile investment?
PPA: Even a Diamond-friendly institution in a high-income country like Norway cannot support every initiative out there. When prioritising, we target initiatives that are both non-profit and have some sort of relevance to UiT’s research and teaching profile. As an Arctic university, we of course found a Canadian Diamond initiative highly relevant. The Literature Acquisition Committee, of which I am a member, looked into the publishing data in Érudit-affiliated journals and were immediately convinced that the Érudit portfolio was relevant to our researchers and students not only for reading, but also for publishing in.
DV: We are constantly on the look out for non-profit and values-aligned initiatives in scholarly communication to support, and then set our priorities taking budgetary restraints into account as well as relevance for academics affiliated with KU Leuven. Several faculty members had asked us to look into Érudit and it was obvious that the collection included many disciplines relevant to our researchers and students.
4. How do you see the leadership of institutions such as UiT and KU Leuven shaping library commitment to open access and open science?
DV: A lot of research libraries all over the world are not only struggling to balance their budgets but also to decide on what to invest in. We are all trying to find our way in a world where most people agree that spending the library’s budget on paywalled sources is less and less the way to go, but where it is not entirely clear where we should move our investments instead. I hope that KU Leuven Libraries can help spark a discussion about what our investment priorities should be and how we should proceed to best serve the institutions, researchers, and students who depend on us to make smart decisions. Very practically, I also hope that we can help other libraries decide what to invest in by being transparent about how we spend our money.
PPA: As any other trade, research librarians are constantly looking around to see what other colleagues are doing. To be honest, we are the first in Norway to adopt this 6% Diamond = 6% investment principle. But we are not the first in Europe to establish a special Fund for Diamond Open Access. The concrete measures taken at Université de Lorraine in France and at several institutions in the Netherlands have been highly inspirational to us. What drives us in our work is not striving to be the first, or the best. Rather, I like to think of us university librarians working to support Diamond Open Access as the hobbits described by J.R.R. Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings: “The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”
