OCLC Research and Ithaka S+R have studied and written extensively about the evolution of higher education and the implications of this evolution for the organizational structure and services of libraries. Today, they are announcing a new project, University Futures; Library Futures, in which OCLC Research and Ithaka S+R are joining forces to carry out a collaborative project on the future of academic libraries, in the context of changes in the higher education landscape.

This paper, presented at ACRL 2017, addresses a number of faculty concerns pertaining to “predatory publishers” and the institutional repository. The aim is to discuss in which ways librarians can educate faculty and graduate students to help them in navigating such issues as open access, institutional repositories, and determining the quality of potential outlets for publication.

This study examines ETDs deposited during the period 2011-2015 in an institutional repository, to determine the degree to which the documents suffer from reference rot. The authors converted and examined 664 doctoral dissertations in total. The results serve to emphasize not only the necessity of broader awareness of this problem, but also to stimulate action on the preservation front.

IFLA Library Map of the World is a representative source of basic library statistics and a robust tool for providing a worldwide comparison of different library  performance metrics, mapped by country level data. In March 2017, IFLA launched the Library Map of the World 2017 Survey to collect a basic set of library performance metrics from as many countries as possible and to make a visualisation of the data for all to use. The data visualisation website will be launched at IFLA WLIC 2017 in Wrocław, Poland in August 2017

IFLA Journal dedicates a second volume to how libraries tackle the challenge of research data management. The main goal of this special issue is to gather the latest theory, research, and state-of-the-art practices from libraries that are informing and innovating effective data services.

Both volumes are published in open access on IFLA Journal website.

See volume 42, N° 4, December 2016 about international approaches to research data services in libraries.

The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of American University Presses (AAUP) are implementing a new initiative to advance the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members by publishing free, open access, digital editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.

The challenge of increasing access to knowledge while reducing the cost of knowledge is addressed. Sustainable article processing charges and alternative open access models are explored. Librarians are facilitators of scholarly communications, and they must play a key role in ensuring that scholarly work can continue and that knowledge can be preserved and disseminated in a sustainable way.

In February 2017,  the libraries at University of Oregon and Oregon State University made contributions that completed a four-year fundraising effort spearheaded by Reveal Digital to develop an open access collection of alternative press periodicals called Independent Voices.  Leading academic libraries from the U.S, Canada, and the U.K. contributed the entire $1.794 million needed to cover the costs of copyright clearance, digitization, platform development and hosting, project management, outreach, and other support activities for this large multi-year project.

The Jisc Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) offers a single point of access to journal and ebook usage data, giving libraries a simple way to analyse usage trends and provide evidence of value for money. The results of the 2016 JUSP community survey are now online.