CNI Spring 2026 Membership Meeting

Open at Scale: Exploring the Value and Impact of the BTAA's Open Publishing Agreement Model
Maurice York and Jeffrey Spies (Big Ten Academic Alliance)
 
From 2021 to 2024, the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) paved the way for a dramatic increase in open access publishing by Big Ten authors—from 38% to more than 86% open in library-negotiated agreements. This was accomplished by innovating the Open Publishing Agreement (OPA) model, a strategy centered on the author experience: no fees, no caps, and no hassle. This values-based approach has delivered significant benefits for author rights, widespread author adoption, and measurable increases in research impact. This presentation will describe the current effort to explore the network of data from Big Ten publications—citations, authors, disciplines, and institutions—to further analyze the impact of these agreements: lowering barriers, expanding opportunities for authors, expediting knowledge sharing, and advancing research. Utilizing network visualizations, the BTAA is examining indicators of impact, such as shifts in citation patterns and global engagement that are directly evident from this initiative. The presenters will also discuss their strategic negotiation approach, including practical elements they are developing, such as the assessment rubric, license agreement terms, and evidence metrics.

https://btaa.org/library/open-scholarship/strategy

Advancing Open Monograph Opportunities at UC: New Pathways for the Future
Lidia Uziel (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Miranda Bennett (California Digital Library, University of California)

In January 2026, the University of California (UC) Libraries released Advancing Open Monograph Opportunities at UC, a report that articulates a values-driven framework for advancing open access monograph publishing. In this session, speakers will present the report and share how its recommendations are being translated into practice through coordinated pilots across the UC system.

While journal-based open access (OA) models have matured, monographs (particularly in the arts, humanities, and social sciences) pose distinct challenges shaped by disciplinary norms, funding structures, and the publishing economics of long-form scholarship. The report responds to this complexity by advancing a model-agnostic, portfolio-based approach that recognizes the diversity of publishing traditions and avoids reliance on any single funding mechanism.

Four strategic directions anchor the framework: targeted investment in book processing charge-based initiatives aligned with institutional research and teaching priorities; expanded support for Diamond OA and free-to-read models that remove both author- and reader-facing fees while advancing bibliodiversity and multilingual scholarship; strengthened partnerships with university presses as trusted stewards of peer-reviewed work; and sustained investment in open, community-owned infrastructure that ensures discoverability, metadata quality, preservation, and long-term sustainability. These strategies are guided by shared scholarly values, including equity, fiscal responsibility, transparency, and community stewardship.

The session will include highlights and lessons learned from UC's implementation of this framework through systemwide pilots that open UC-authored monographs at no cost to authors, combine frontlist and backlist approaches, and provide predictable, scalable support for university presses. Together, the framework and pilots demonstrate how a large research university system is aligning values with action, offering practical insights for institutions seeking sustainable futures for open monograph publishing.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9r22k58w
https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2026/01/advancing-open-monograph-opportunities-at-uc-new-pathways-for-the-future/
https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2026/01/open-access-for-uc-authored-monographs/

Thousands of institutions have adopted the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to provide access to digitized collections, yet the content served through these APIs, including hundreds of thousands of maps, remains largely undiscoverable by location and difficult to use across institutional boundaries. Allmaps is an open source ecosystem that enables anyone to curate, georeference, and explore these resources without requiring GIS expertise or specialized infrastructure. In 2025, following the termination of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the IIIF Consortium formalized a tiered partnership with Allmaps to sustain its development. This is intended to be the first in a broader effort to help institutions realize the collective value of the content their shared infrastructure makes accessible via IIIF. This briefing will present the strategic rationale for this new consortial model from both the IIIF Consortium and Yale University Library, an early Allmaps Innovator. The session will explore how the partnership delivers tangible benefits to the community, from lowering barriers to georeferencing and cross-collection map discovery, to providing institutions with crowdsourcing tools, integration services, and governance participation without requiring specialized GIS infrastructure. Discussion will focus on how consortial organizations can move beyond standards-setting to actively steward and unlock the value of the content communities have collectively invested in digitizing.

https://allmaps.org/iiif-partnership

The injustices embedded in the collecting and descriptive practices of libraries, museums, and archives are now widely recognized and have prompted many cultural institutions to pursue inclusive and reparative initiatives, such as harmful language statements and content warnings. Remediating outdated and offensive language in metadata is, however, a far more daunting task, especially at scale. While resources like the Inclusive Metadata Toolkit support informed reparative decision-making, identifying problematic terms remains a tedious and emotionally taxing process dependent on individual keyword searching. Consequently, many institutions either lack the time and resources to engage in this work or are constrained by the sheer volume of potentially harmful language present in metadata records. With the support of an internal library seed grant program, the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah  developed the Marriott Reparative Metadata Assessment Tool (MaRMAT), an open source, schema-agnostic, Python-based application for bulk metadata assessment. MaRMAT assesses tabular metadata against pre-curated and custom lexicons, generating a report flagging potentially harmful terminology by field, category, and context. By making large-scale assessment more accessible, MaRMAT empowers cultural heritage organizations to circumvent individual bias and advance equity in digital collections. MaRMAT's successful development also demonstrates the impact of small seed grant programs.

https://www.marmatproject.org/
https://github.com/marriott-library/MaRMAT