ebooks.lu – a digital offer for public libraries

In 2015, the Conseil Supérieur des Bibliothèques (CSB) tasked the Consortium department to propose a new consortial structure to bring ebooks to public libraries (literature and non-fiction). In mid-2015, the ebooks.lu service was launched as a two-year pilot project and has since become a stable self-financing consortium of 12 public libraries, including the National Library. Its innovative feature is the integration of a multi-lingual offer of ebooks and audiobooks from several vendors, whereas most public libraries outside Luxembourg only use one (often single-language) vendor. ebooks.lu is a trilingual promotion site and contains extensive user guides. All ebooks are integrated into the a-z.lu discovery tool of the National library and are available through single-sign-on with existing library cards from the bibnet.lu network.

bibgov.lu – Bibliothèque gouvernementale numérique

In 2017, the former governmental library was reborn as a digital service through the initiative of the Ministère de la Fonction publique (MFP). The National Library’s Consortium department and IT services set up a service that offers legal databases, journals and reference works for the documentation and ongoing training of public employees. Among its most popular features is the remote login, which is managed through the government computing center’s (CTIE) identity management system with Luxtrust smart cards and mobile app.  More on the bibgov.lu page.

read-y, an ebook library for secondary education

The initiative was launched in summer 2020 to encourage young people to read for pleasure. The books on the platform are not used during classes. The entire multilingual library can be searched and read from within a single app (Sora from Overdrive) via ready.script.lu without any of the hassles of downloading DRM protected content with third party applications. The login is via the students’ existing login from their schools, managed by CGIE-IAM.

Transition to Open Access/Open Science

In 2016, an in-depth report on Open Access infrastructures and impact on services was written by the Consortium department. Based on this report, priorities were set together with research stakeholders and a pilot project on “Monitoring the Open Access Transition” was undertaken in 2017.

The pilot project resulted in a new plan for a data-driven transition towards Open Access. In our view, the consortial management of the Open Access transition should be policy agnostic and focus on financial aspects of our members’ relations to publishers.

Therefore, the actions are not policy or advocacy, but data collection and analytics. Complete data on the publishing output and total spent towards publishers (including for-fee open access publishing and any other publishing charges) are preconditions for successful management of the Open Access transition.

Several projects were launched to achive this goal:

OA Switchboard

The National library and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) now also support the OA Switchboard initiative at the national level. The OA Switchboard is building a centralised messaging hub between publishers, funders and libraries for cost and publication management. The OA Switchboard is delivering publication data via API ino the consortium’s management system. As of 2024 the first large publishers such as DeGruyter and Wiley have joined OA Switchboard.

ChronosHub

The second project explores centralised payments for publishing costs (such as open access fees for articles). In 2021, it is estimated that Open Access fees (APC, Article Publishing Charge) of more than 600 000 EUR are paid “in the wild”, ie without centralised management of bibliographic data nor appropriate article identifiers. While formally correct, such distributed payments across labs, projects and funders make it impossible to assess the true publication activity and cost by publisher.

As a spin off from this project, a collaboration between ChronosHub, the National library and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) was formalised in June 2021, after a pilot phase in 2020. This new tool centralises all APC related financial, compliance and eligibility processes for articles published under FNR grants. As of 2024, the FNR successfully continues to use ChronosHub for its Open Access fund.

Read & Publish (“Transformative”) Licences

A third strand of work is the inclusion of Open Access publications in publisher licences. In 2021, two so-called “Transformative Licences” were signed, through which the Consortium integrates the “Read” (formerly subscriptions) and “Publish” APC (Article Publishing Charge) costs in a single licence. Thereby the substantial additional costs of APC “in the wild” are either offset completely or at least reduced.
Additionally, there is detailled information about the published articles and their costs.

As of 2024, there are four Read&Publish licences in place: Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, DeGruyter, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery). Note: ACM has a transfomative process to become a completely Open Access publisher.

Two national framework licences are in place with a new type of publishers who only publish Open Access, resulting in substantial discounts for all APCs: Frontiers and MDPI.

ReadMETRICS

A final strand of work around usage statistics started in 2018. For several use cases, such as cost-control, finegrained analytics and quality control of publisher provided statistics, better data was required. A successful proof-of-concept was run with the IT department of the National Library in early 2019, using the ezPAARSE software (it parses proxy server logs into lists of access events and identifies articles, including the availability of an open access version and full metadata). A collaboration with INIST-CNRS (Nancy) and Couperin was formalised in 2020 and resulted in a new toolkit called “ReadMETRICS” consisting of ezMESURE (Elastic-Kibana) and ezPAARSE, enriched with CrossRef and Unpaywall data.
In late 2023, INIST-CNRS bundled the entire set of statistics tools under the brand ReadMETRICS.org, including a mature consortial COUNTER/Sushi tool.

Outlook

The opening of scientific publishing will facilitate workflows to integrate the core missions of the National Library such as a complete record of the national scientific output including digital legal deposit, long-term archiving and identifier stewardship (“Record of versions”).

We could not have made such progress without our project partners nor our international community drivers such as the oa2020 project and the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC).

More

For information about the services and history of the department of the Consortium at the National library, please go to our About page.