From 5 to 7 July 2023, representatives of research libraries all over Europe flocked together in the city of Budapest, Hungary, for the 52nd annual conference of LIBER. LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche, or Association of European Research Libraries) presents itself as the voice of Europe’s research library community, hosting and organizing several events during the year, of which the annual conference is the largest. LIBER events and day-to-day practices focus on highly relevant topics for academic research in general and for research library professionals specifically. This year's conference featured presentations and workshops on topics as diverse as Citizen Science, open text books, open licensing and the European Open Science Cloud.
The city of Budapest was not chosen at random as the location for the 2023 conference: February of this year saw the 20th anniversary of the Budapest Open Acces Initative, one of the earliest milestones on the road to Open Science. In twenty years, a lot has changed: Universities and (inter)national research funders have Open Science policies and requirements; research is done more and more outside of the vacuum of academia, aiming to involve as many people as possible and to keep firmly in touch with society's struggles and opportunities; and Open Acces publication rates have sky-rocketed the past few years (For TIU, in 2022, 1102 (86%) of in total 1286 peer reviewed articles published in journals were OA). This is not to say that we have come to the end of the road to Open Science: There are still many challenges to be met in the coming years. The Budapest Open Acces initiative has given new recommendations for the next ten years, regarding infrastructures, research assessment, APCs and read-and-publish agreements. On a more local level, at TiU, we, researchers and library and IT professionals, are co-reating Open Science policies, research infrastructures and data hubs, to make it easier for researchers to work together and share their research with each other and with those outside of the research community TiU library is also involved in an initative of the LIBER Digital Scholarship and Digital Cultural Heritage (DSDCH) working group, with the aim of creating a centralised, sustainable skills hub for research library professionals to more easily discover, and share, trusted training materials at the intersection of library collections and computing.
Are you interested in Open Science in general and at TiU? Please join us at 'Open to Complexity: Symposium on Open Science in the Social Sciences and Humanities', 5 September 2023. For more information on this symposium, taking place in the beautiful new MindLabs building near the Tilburg central train station, please visit the symposium's page. Attendance is free, but registration is required.
For more information on LIBER's mission, working groups and events, please visit libereurope.eu
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