NASIG 2025

Libraries have numerous opportunities to promote open access through subvention funds, supporting open collections, and providing access to research produced by their institutions. This workshop will guide participants in evaluating current open access initiatives, creating strategic documentation to enhance collection development for the future, and offering a roadmap for assessment and benchmarking. Librarians from the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries will share their experience in drafting a strategic plan that considers all pathways to open access, including green, hybrid, gold, and platinum options. Participants will gain a clearer understanding of data-driven methods for identifying open access needs within their organizations, how to develop SMART goals that align collection budgets with professional values, and strategies for fostering collective action around open access across their campuses.

ISSN was first published as an ISO standard in 1975, making 2025 its 50th birthday. Come help us celebrate the history, drama, and accomplishments of this important standard with some humor and maybe a song or three. Great moments in ISSN history will be dramatized and cameos by such fellow  identifiers as DOI, ISBN, and ISNI will take competitive jabs at ISSN's success. Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the background and significance of the standard and its use today.  

Learning Outcomes

Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the background and significance of the standard and its use today.

"Diversity and Libraries: The Stigma of Mental Illness" describes the stigma of mental illness in libraries, regardless of strong diversity programs. The presenter will discuss the literature and the results of a short survey conducted by the presenter. The results of the survey will be analyzed and recommendations for improvement will be presented.

Learning Outcomes

1. Know about the stigma of mental illness in libraries.
2. Understand what is missing in Diversity Statements that do not take into consideration mental illness.
3. Realize ways Diversity Statements can be changed to take into consideration mental illness.

License agreements influence how libraries, students, researchers, and other users interact with electronic resources. A forthcoming open e-book by five law and licensing experts from institutions across the US – (“E-resource Licensing Explained,” to be published by ARL) – will empower academic librarians and library staff with licensing responsibilities to advocate for license terms that enable computational research. The guidebook includes easily-digestible legal explanations and pragmatic strategies for preserving rights that users already have under US copyright law, particularly in the face of restrictive license terms that would otherwise constrain or eliminate those rights. During this session, the guidebook’s co-authors and reviewers will share their own insights, challenges, and successes in negotiating for license agreements.

Learning Outcomes

Following this session, participants will be able to: recognize the fundamental concepts of licensing e-resources, and identify licensing resources.

The common team structure within libraries, especially in technical services, can often lead to silos of processes as well as knowledge about our systems and our collections. With modern library service platforms (LSPs), it is important to recognize the interconnected system of records, specifically acquisitions and cataloging records. If this is neglected, it will negatively impact the data quality and the functionality of the catalog and ultimately, will affect the ability to collect data from LSP in any useful way. This presentation will examine causes of segmented workflows and provide guidance on overcoming silos and developing cross-departmental relationships to improve workflows and productivity. Strategies for collaborative workflows including examples of governance groups, shared documentation, tracking and others will be given.

Learning Outcomes
Participants will be able to:

1.Identify the causes of departmental silos between acquisitions, cataloging, and other library departments, and understand how this fragmentation affects library organization.
 
2.Develop strategies to overcome departmental silos in library workflows and establish more collaborative processes between technical services teams.
 
3.Learn best practices for fostering cross-departmental relationships, enhancing communication, documentation, and improving overall workflow efficiency in library technical services.

As Open Access (OA) is gaining momentum, institutions are engaging in partnerships to help further advancements in open publishing. Publishers are embracing Transformative Agreements, Read and Publish deals, and Subscribe to Open (S2O) models. With this new landscape comes the challenge of quantifying the impact and value on investments for both institutions and publishers alike. Metrics such as COUNTER statistics are a powerful tool for assessing the reach, engagement, and scholarly impact of OA initiatives within collaborative institutional-publisher frameworks.
This session seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding of how statistics can be strategically employed to measure and communicate the value of OA in partnerships with both traditional publishers and emerging open models. Hear from stakeholders across the industry (two librarians, one small publisher, and one large publisher) for different perspectives on the proliferation of OA and how statistics can help tell a story.

Learning Outcomes
Attendees will gain a deep understanding of how metrics like COUNTER can be harnessed to measure and communicate the impact and value of OA in institutional collaborations, fostering informed decision-making and strategic planning in the dynamic landscape of scholarly communication.

As the momentum around open access continues (OA), university libraries play an important role in promoting and supporting OA and advancing research that is inclusive and accessible. The Emory Libraries’ Open Access Dashboard (OAB) aims to create a data visualization tool that showcases both the Libraries' financial investment in open access and overall Emory researcher OA activity. In other words, where are researchers publishing OA, what are the funding sources for OA, how much is the university paying for OA, and how are the Emory Libraries facilitating OA publication? This presentation will demonstrate the importance of tracking and showcasing OA investments, enabling institutional libraries to make informed decisions about their OA strategies and promote their commitment to OA. It will serve as a model for other university libraries as they seek to do the same, promoting transparency and collaboration within the OA library community.

In discussing the design and establishment of the dashboard, we will highlight the choices and decisions made surrounding data collection and data elements along with the challenges of melding together multiple sources of data, including bibliometric data, article processing charges data (APCs), and internal and external funding sources. We will further discuss the strengths and limitations of the data and why we chose different data views in Tableau.

Learning Outcomes

1. Attendees will gain insight on how to track and visualize OA publishing at their local institution and how such visualization can enable the library to highlight their contribution and commitment to OA. 
2. Attendees will gain an appreciation for the data challenges that modeling and visualizing OA activities can present to libraries.
3. Attendees will see how the OA dashboard data can be used in decision-making and advocacy for OA article funding investments.

This presentation gives an overview of interactions between United States (U.S.) copyright law and artificial intelligence (AI). Current generative AI is different from past big data, in that current AI models train on full text long form written works, while in the past, datasets and structured information had the highest value. Also, in recent years, there has been extensive economic activity around AI, which newly surfaced business oriented issues. As a result, new issues have arisen regarding copyright law and AI.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, the U.S. Copyright Office held listening sessions around specific topics related to generative AI and copyright. The Copyright Office released guidance about digital replicas (ie. deep fakes) with guidance yet to come on additional topics including copyrightability of works incorporating AI-generated material, training AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and liability issues. This presentation gives a just-the-facts summary of U.S. Copyright Office activities, and of emergent case law from lawsuits related to AI and copyright.

A current parallel regulatory thrust is comprehensive U.S. federal regulation of AI ethics. The National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020 provided funding for a 5 year roll out of AI regulation. With AI ethics regulation in rapid development in the U.S., and legally binding outcomes pending in the near future, large corporations building AI tools have a strong incentive to control the conversation and define AI ethics. By emphasizing copyright, corporations might seek to shift emphasis away from other ethical issues, such as the impacts algorithmic decision making has on people’s lives, increased surveillance, and other ethical issues. For example, it may be the case that ethics discussion is steered towards copyright law and “ethical AI” co-opted to refer to training AI models on licensed content. This presentation considers ethics more broadly, and invites participants to consider how increased focus on copyright and ethics might distract from other ethical issues.

Licensing dovetails with copyright, in that contractual obligations or contractual rights can shift what is allowable and can limit fair use or can expand what is allowed. Generative AI is largely controlled by a handful of very large corporations. High quality training data, such as scholarly articles and other high quality material written by people, tends to be controlled by not-quite-as-large corporations. For example, Google’s market cap is 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars, more than 600 times Clarivate’s market cap of 3.6 billion U.S. dollars. In order to maintain control of assets, in light of a potentially lucrative new use, academic database providers might tend to contractually limit established fair uses like text mining. This presentation brushes on text mining as fair use, and on trends in licensing restrictions.

This presentation overviews recent trends in U.S. copyright law and AI, with emphasis on developing federal regulations and guidance, AI ethics, and the legal right of scholars to do text as impacted by changing licensing practices.

Learning Outcomes

1. Identify the key initiative at the U.S. Copyright Office to address copyright and artificial intelligence issues, and know where to go to quickly find overview information.
2. Know that comprehensive federal regulation of artificial intelligence ethics is currently underway, and the general timeline.
3. Consider artificial intelligence ethics in terms of fairness, accountability, and transparency, and thoughtfully consider the implications when ethics discussion omits any of those key areas.
4. Understand economic issues related to the resource needs and cost to train a generative AI, how consolidated the generative AI industry is, and how incentives differ for a very large tech company like Google versus even the largest academic publishers.
5. Understand that text mining is an established fair use under U.S. copyright law, and that at the same time a contractual restriction in a license agreement can limit rights.