In this interview, Louise Otting shares what a typical day is like as a collections and license manager, and how her role has helped strengthen her understanding of the open science landscape.
As part of an ongoing series here on ACS Axial, we’re interviewing authors and librarians from around the world to find out more about their research, their published work, and the impact that open science is having on a changing landscape of research communication. This time, we caught up with Louise Otting, Collections and License Manager at TU Delft.
I think that open science is essential in helping the whole world collaborate on the biggest challenges that we face and that we cannot solve as individuals...
Hello, Louise - could you tell us about your role at TU Delft?
I'm a collections and license manager at TU Delft, which means that I'm responsible for negotiating access to resources for research and education, as well as essential sources for our supporting staff. This includes read and publish agreements negotiated with publishers.
I also liaise with the various faculties and departments to get their input on the university's publication policy, to make sure that we as a library support them in the best ways and that we have a shared vision on where we want to go as a university.
What does the average day look like for you?
I have two typical types of days. When I'm at the university, my days are often filled with visits to faculties, a lot of meetings, and delivering presentations on the work we're doing, what type of deals we have, and answering questions on publishing—lots of talking with colleagues and running around. The other half of the week, when I'm working from home, is when I actually have the time to sit down and do the work, like answer all my emails, write up proposals, analyze licenses and usage and create presentations.
When did you first hear the term "open access"?
The idea of open access has been around for a very long time, and it was something I was aware of and heard people talk about, but I wasn't deeply involved with it until I applied for the interim job of a collection manager at TU Delft about three years ago. As part of that process I really had to dig into understanding the details of open access and get a good handle on all the different approaches. Since then it's become something that's very relevant to my job.
Open access is a very important part of the open science movement for me, and I think that open science is essential in helping the whole world collaborate on the biggest challenges that we face and that we cannot solve as individuals or even in smaller groups. It's essential in creating a better world and sharing our knowledge, and enabling us all to collaborate with each other on new discoveries.
Your institution joined an ACS read and publish agreement as part of the Universities of the Netherlands consortium (SURFmarket BV). This was ACS' first read and publish agreement. What do you think the rationale was from your institution's perspective?
There's two very important parts to this. Firstly, we in the Netherlands are striving for 100% open access publishing. That's definitely an important part of this, and our agreement with ACS was one of the deals that would help us achieve that.
The second part is that we want to make it as easy as possible for our researchers to publish open access articles. They already have a huge workload, and we want to remove as many barriers to open access as we can. These read and publish deals really help with that as well because the workflow is very, very easy. Our researchers don't have to worry about applying for publishing funds, because the library handles everything.
Specifically about the ACS agreement, our researchers tell us it's going very smoothly. We've hardly had any questions on the process, and we can see that they're making use of the open access publishing option, and all the feedback we've had on the support that the agreement provides has been very positive. The agreement has definitely brought what we hoped it would: a very smooth workflow for them to publish.
What do you think are the biggest recent developments in open science and open access?
Developments in open access and open science are happening very quickly. Some of the most recent developments have been an increasing adoption of open data and open infrastructures. I think we're making headway there and starting to collaborate more as well.
As an institution, we've almost reached 100% open access publishing—according to Open Access Monitor, we're currently at 99%. But now we've almost reached that milestone, we're starting to look more at the wider landscape and ask if it really answers what we set out to do. Of course, new challenges are surfacing, and there are concerning issues with the rise of generative AI and paper mills. There's also been a huge growth in journals and peer review requests. We can look at this and see that part of the system is working, because OA is growing very rapidly, but the growth itself is becoming one of the problems we face.
Amongst all this, we find that the most valuable relationships with publishers are those where they really work with us and think about where we want to go, and discuss how we continue to both exist and thrive, but also work towards the goal of collaborating worldwide on the bigger challenges that we're facing—and at the same time, making this manageable for our researchers as well.
Where do you think open science will be in the next 10 years?
In ten years I think we'll still be de-entangling the commercial and idealistic goals for open science. I think both commercial publishers and other community-led initiatives will continue to exist beside each other, but we should have a much clearer picture on what to publish, where, and how. And I think the community initiatives will start to see more investment, creating more autonomy, more equity, more sustainability—but more broadly I think we will all be taking a hard look at the overall quality of research. We've all seen how much damage a bad paper can do, with misinformation continuing to be circulated long after an article has been retracted, so I think the quality control of published research will definitely be a very big thing. Growth is also something that we'll have to look at: how do we make this manageable for everyone involved?
Through all of this, we will have some very firm partnerships with several publishers (and perhaps some less strong bonds with others). I'm really happy with publishers reaching out more and more, demonstrating how we can look into things together, and becoming more transparent in their operations. I think it's very clear that we, as universities, do not want to get rid of publishers—but we want to find better ways of collaborating that means that we can all continue to exist and deliver the best quality, the best service, and the best ways of making the whole process sustainable and equitable. We've had a long period of figuring things out, but now we've reached the point where we can start looking ahead to what can be achieved in the most transparent way possible.
Finally—if you hadn't chosen your current career, what would you be doing?
That's a really difficult question! Before I was working in an academic library, I was working in the public library system in the Netherlands, so I probably would have stayed within that system. I really enjoyed working in the youth departments there, so I would probably be doing something like that.
I also really enjoy working with people and seeing if we can solve bottlenecks and remove obstacles—so if I was completely outside of the information industry, I would probably be doing something in process management.
Check out the other interviews in this series:
Professor Ian Cousins, Stockholm University
Dr. Hongxia Duan, TU Eindhoven
Dr. Vojtěch Vaněček, Institute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences