University Library Center for Digital Scholarship facilitates open access to knowledge created by researchers, students, and affiliated partners. The Center advocates for open and equitable practices in creating, disseminating, and evaluating scholarship. Our aim is to remove barriers to global participation in a knowledge commons and to build a more diverse, equitable, and sustainable system of scholarly communication. We work toward these goals by:
- Openly disseminating unique scholarship, data, and artifacts created by faculty, students, staff and affiliated partners;
- Advocating for the rights of authors, fair use, and open access to knowledge and publications;
- Implementing and promoting ethical and sustainable practices for creation, description, preservation, sharing, and reuse of all scholarship, including data and other artifacts;
- Strategically adopting and advocating for investment in open research and community-controlled infrastructure;
- Advocating for the responsible use of research metrics in the evaluation of scholars and their scholarly products;
- Participating in and contributing to projects that offer a community-driven solution to creating and sharing knowledge openly.
The Center for Digital Scholarship supports University Library’s mission to inform, connect, and transform through its work with a particular focus on the Library’s values.
By shaping our work around the Library’s value for open knowledge, the Center also supports the campus's core values and commitment to community engagement by enhancing the availability of scholarly information not only for the residents of Indiana but for the world. (minor edit, July 20, 2026)
Open Values Statement
University Library supports and promotes the concept of open culture. This includes research, digital collections and data, publications, scholarly products, and technological resources. In doing so, we seek to create, curate, and share, whenever possible, work that is barrier-free and immediately available to anyone with access to the internet. In addition, we advocate that producers of such work allow the re-use and re-design of their work by the public through open licensing.
This commitment to openness is a tangible reflection of our belief that access to and creation of resources should be available to all regardless of education level, geographic location, organizational affiliation, socioeconomic status, and personal or cultural identity. Accordingly, we support our community in the creation of open resources and facilitate fair access to those resources.
We also acknowledge that open knowledge is in the economic interest of the Library and our campus. It allows us to invest our resources in our institution and its unique content and research strengths, thus enhancing the well-being of the institution and the state of Indiana.
We aim to create a culture of openness on our campus. To that end, we support our community in contributing to the open knowledge landscape through promoting (including but not limited to) open access publishing, open collections, open and FAIR data, and open educational resources. We educate our community about the value of openness in the free exchange of information and how to find and use open resources.
To demonstrate our values, we commit to:
- making research available to the broader community through open access publishing and the library’s institutional repositories, cultural heritage collections, and other open platforms; and, thereby, increasing the visibility of IU Indianapolis research and central Indiana history
- creating opportunities for innovative learning and scholarship through sharing and reuse of open educational resources.
- supporting and participating in collaborative open initiatives within our institution and with other research, higher education, and community-based organizations, including institutional memberships in open projects and organizations.
- choosing open source software, tools, and resources for library projects when at all possible.
- making tools, software, and intellectual output created by our staff open using appropriate open licensing, when possible.
- partnering with other institutions that support open knowledge to raise our collective bargaining power with vendors.
- joining national advocacy for openness and supporting public policy that furthers the open exchange of information.
In keeping with our commitment to openness, University Library will be transparent in its work by sharing our Open Values Statement, the Action Group for Open Access’s evaluation criteria and related documents, a list of memberships, and information about open initiatives/projects undertaken.
Approved by the Scholarly Communication Advisory Group, June 26, 2019
Revised and approved by the Action Group for Open Access, April 9, 2026