Abstract
Serials crisis: can data help treat this chronic condition?
When it comes to library budgets, there is an ever-widening gap between university budgets and library budgets, with library budgets continuing to shrink even when the university budgets may increase. This gap is neither new nor novel; but now in this era of a global pandemic, moves to online learning, unprecedented changes in higher education budgets, the problem is worse than ever and likely poised to accelerate at a rapid pace.
What may be different, however, is that today’s deep well of data can help stakeholders track down, understand, and respond to the challenge. But what data is most useful and how can we gather it?
In this session, we will take a global view from leading experts in both consortia and institutional libraries about data hunting and innovative ways data can be used to make the most of purchasing spend. Visibility into current pricing trends, including by discipline, business model and publisher helps inform the purchasing context. At-a-glance intelligence about business models and deals, as well as descriptions of emerging model and deal types, help early career professionals and senior staff alike keep current on this rapidly changing landscape.
We ask participants to come prepared to share experiences advocating for funding from institutions, as well as turning those dollars into access to the resources in demand by constituent academics and researchers.
Impact transparency: creating visibility into research outcomes
Impact and outcome measurement are major topics in the research community. Trillions of dollars are spent annually on research programs, yet far too many organizations still struggle to answer the basic questions: What was the overall impact of the funding on research and on the researchers’ careers? How do I link the research I funded or received to publications, patents, clinical trials and other outputs?
Why is it so hard to answer these questions?
While many research-oriented organizations aspire to operationalize their impact and outcome tracking and reporting, many are still reliant upon inadequate or incomplete datasets and management systems.
This talk will explore how advances in metadata, artificial intelligence, and open research infrastructure make it possible to create unprecedented transparency into outcomes from award to publication and beyond. Secondly, this discussion will describe how transparency into outcomes benefits the entire research ecosystem.
Leveraging years of grants management data, we’ll show graphically how funding organizations and research institutions can precisely identify outcomes – years after a grant has concluded as well as trace the arc of their researchers’ work from award to publication and beyond.
