Duration: July 2025 - September 2025
Team: Sarah Lippincott, Katherine Skinner, Lauren Collister, Chrys Wu
Skillset: Landscape Analysis, Convening / Facilitation
Overview
Library consortia have been doing the essential work of holding academic institutions together for decades, supporting shared collections, coordinated licensing, and pooled expertise. For much of that time, the core work was coordinating licensing deals and managing shared print collections, negotiating with commercial publishers on behalf of members and making the most of collective buying power.
That work is now harder to sustain. Library budgets are falling, institutions are consolidating or closing, and transformative agreements have complicated the multi-institutional deals that consortia previously brokered. The commercial licensing work that defined consortia for a generation is no longer the stable foundation it once was.And while many consortia leaders could see that coordinating more deliberately around open infrastructure was part of the answer, the field lacked a clear picture of what that coordination might actually look like.
IOI set out to build that picture.
What we did
We conducted a thorough review of strategic plans and public materials from consortia across the country, alongside 12 in-depth interviews with consortial leaders who were willing to speak candidly about where they are, what's working, and what feels out of reach.
What came through clearly was both the challenge and the opportunity. Licensing relationships with large commercial publishers are fraying as library budgets shrink and membership numbers fall. That leaves a gap in consortial services, and a real opening to coordinate joint investments in open, non-proprietary approaches that serve members without baking in long-term dependence on commercial intermediaries. The leaders we spoke with were thinking seriously about how to make that case inside their organizations and to their members.
From that research, we identified five avenues where consortia are already making collective impact and where more coordinated investment could go further: hosting, building, sponsoring, training, and cultivating.
Outcomes and impact
ORBIT documented a clear, evidence-based account of where consortia stand on open infrastructure, and it provided a glimpse of what collective action at scale for open infrastructure could accomplish.
The five-pathway framework we outlined in our full findings is practical rather than aspirational. It reflects what consortia are already doing well, and points to where more coordinated effort could reduce duplication, spread risk more sensibly, and give open infrastructure a steadier foundation than one-off, project-based funding can provide.
The research also made something explicit that often goes unsaid: the case for investing in open infrastructure is not just about values. Consortia leaders were direct on this point. Reducing dependence on vendors who can raise prices or shut down and building shared capacity that individual institutions can no longer afford on their own are all practical reasons to invest in open infrastructure, not just principled ones.
The full findings are publicly available.
— Rachel Caldwell, Head, Academic Engagement at University of Massachusetts Amherst
The infrastructure holding everything else up
Every consortium serves a different mix of members, across different library types, geographies, and institutional sizes. What collective investment in open infrastructure looks like will vary accordingly. But the underlying opportunity is the same: consortia are uniquely positioned to cultivate the networks of support that open infrastructure needs, and many are already finding ways to do it.
If you're a consortial leader thinking through what that could look like for your membership, we'd love to talk it through with you.
Project outputs
Report
Lippincott, S., Skinner, K., Collister, L., & Wu, C. (2025). Open resilience: Building infrastructure together (ORBIT) landscape scan. Invest in Open Infrastructure. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17193778
Blog Posts
- Lippincott, S., Skinner, K., Collister, L., & Wu, C. (2025). How library consortia are building resilient open infrastructure in times of crisis. Invest in Open Infrastructure. https://investinopen.org/blog/how-library-consortia-are-building-resilient-open-infrastructure-in-times-of-crisis/
