Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: KU Leuven has been investing in Open Access for many years, following three complementary tracks to support more open, fair, and sustainable scholarly publishing. This poster presents the main milestones and achievements of these tracks, visualized as lines on a metro map. The first line is the Repository line, which traces KU Leuven's policy on open archiving. In 2011, Lirias, the institutional repository, was introduced as KU Leuven’s solution for open archiving. By 2015, depositing peer-reviewed journal articles in Lirias became mandatory. A major step forward came in 2018, with the introduction of the Belgian Open Access law, which grants authors the right to openly share the accepted manuscript of their journal articles within 12 months of publication. Today, KU Leuven authors are required to deposit the full text of not only journal articles but also book chapters and conference proceedings. As a result of this open archiving policy, about 70% of journal articles published by KU Leuven authors between 2019 and 2024 are now openly available through Lirias. This percentage is explained by the fact that, while depositing is mandatory, authors can still choose whether their deposits are openly accessible or not. The second line on the Open Access metro map is the Central line, which highlights funding decisions and initiatives led by KU Leuven Libraries. We were early supporters of non-profit Open Access, backing initiatives like the Open Library of Humanities. A key milestone came in 2018 with the launch of the KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access, created to support non-profit implementations of open publishing. Rather than signing up for transformative agreements that continue to channel substantial funding to commercial publishers, KU Leuven Libraries' leadership made a principled decision to prioritize structural support by funding community-led platforms. Over time, the fund has also evolved: now it supports both publishing initiatives and the infrastructure that underpins sustainable scholarly publishing. Finally, the third line of Open Access support at KU Leuven is the Decentral line: the support that comes from specific faculties and discipline-specific libraries. This is crucial, because changing how libraries invest in scholarly publishing is key to a more sustainable ecosystem. We believe libraries should rethink how they use their budgets: moving from paying for access to paywalled content to investing in the systems and services that enable equitable Open Access publishing. Artes, the library serving the Faculty of Arts, aims to lead by example. In 2020, Artes began allocating part of the collection budget to support discipline-specific, non-profit Open Access initiatives that align with the collection profile. By 2024, the Faculty of Arts formally encouraged Artes to step up these investments, and this year, the Literary and Cultural Studies Research Unit adopted clear criteria for its publication grants, explicitly prioritizing non-profit publishers, Open Access, and rights retention. Together, these three lines show how Open Access at KU Leuven is not just one centralized project, but a combined effort: from policy to investments, from central funding to faculty-level decisions. What connects them is a shared commitment to non-profit, community-aligned models of publishing.
Source: Lirias
Authors: Mesotten, Laura, Verbeke, Demmy
Institution: KU Leuven
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: KU Leuven
OpenAlex ID: W7083311292
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