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The past year has seen more deals that led to more concentration, loss of diversity, and ultimately to the academic community’s lessening control over its own destiny. However, there are also positive signs: a large merger failed, Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) was launched as a concerted effort to build a community-owned infrastructure, and some legislative progress was made. Much remains to be done, but the opportunity to tip the scales in favor of the interests of the knowledge community is significant and must be pursued.

In 2020, as the COVID pandemic continued to spread, colleges and universities took action to protect staff, faculty, and students, while continuing to teach and conduct research to assess the impact on academic libraries as all learning rapidly moved online. The SPARC study on the impact of COVID was intended to address academic libraries’ budgetary challenges and approaches, with a focus on understanding how they affected attitudes towards content, collections, and open initiatives. The study included a survey, sent to all 242 current SPARC member institutions in January 2021. Responses were received from institutions in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The responses included multiple submissions from the same library, partial responses, and a small number of responses from non-member institutions. Once blank entries and duplicates were removed, the final dataset included 117 complete responses and 20 partial responses. Several responses were followed up with phone interviews to gain further insight into the choices made and strategies implemented. While this survey was conducted during the last academic year and is being released as the new year begins to unfold, this report can serve to reflect the realities of libraries over the past year in a way that can be helpful in informing the decisions and actions taken moving forward. The study underscored the extremely difficult circumstances faced by most academic libraries as a result of the pandemic—and libraries’ continuing support for open initiatives despite these challenges. This moment has encouraged rapid change, permitting librar- ies to attempt changes they had considered in the past and accelerating changes already underway. Among these trends were questioning Big Deal agreements, renegotiating prices with major publishers, and continuing support for open initiatives.

The 15th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative provided an excellent opportunity to take stock of global progress toward open access and to gauge the main obstacles still remaining to the widespread adoption of open access policies and practices. As part of this process, feedback was solicited through an open survey that was disseminated online, and that received responses from individuals in 60 countries around the world.Markers of progress are clear. The lack of understanding of the concept of open access and a myriad of misconceptions that were pervasive at the time of the BOAI’s original convening have receded, as open access has become a widely accepted fact of lifein research and scholarship. These have been supplanted by concerns that are more operational and nuanced in nature, essentially moving from debates about the “what and why” of open access to the “how“—how to best get it done.The survey showed two clear primary challenges. First and foremost, respondents noted the lack of meaningful incentives and rewards for scholars and researchers to openly share their work. This challenge resonated at both the global level (56% of respondents in Figure 1) and the local level (29.5% of respondents in Table 1). This was followed by concern over a lack of funds to pay for APCs or other open access-related costs (36% of respondents in Figure 1; 28.3% of respondents in Table 1).The results of the survey indicate the transition from establishing open access as a concept—which the BOAI did for the first time in 2002—to making open the default for research and scholarship. These two key challenges point to areas where concerted effort needs to be focused to continue making progress towards open access. Strategies to align incentives and rewards for scholars to share their work openly and the need to construct affordable, sustainable, and equitable business models to support open access publishing must be embraced as primary working priorities by the open access community.

The Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI, https://sparcopen.org/coapi ) is committed to sharing information and resources to assist in the development and implementation of institutional Open Access (OA) policies. The COAPI Toolkit includes a diverse collection of resources that COAPI members have developed in the course of their OA policy initiatives. These resources are openly accessible and published here under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licenses, unless otherwise noted on the resources themselves.