In 2025, it will be 600 years since a university was founded in Leuven, the forerunner of today’s KU Leuven. In anticipation to these festivities, KU Leuven Libraries, in collaboration with UCLouvain, is putting its academic collection in the spotlight. Thanks to the efforts of the past months and years, images of 2025 rare books published by Leuven professors have now been uploaded to the Lovaniensia platform. However, this enormous growth – in May 2020, about 400 works were available digitally – is not the only reason why it is worth surfing to this website. There are also extra pages with information about the Old University of Leuven (1425-1797) and its various faculties, and the professors’ page was supplemented with biographical descriptions of some 130 professors (with even more extensive records for each professor in ODIS). In addition, via the filters it is now clear which works have been digitised internally or externally. And last but not least, thanks to a collaboration with Google Books, all works from the Leuven collection are now provided with an ocr layer, so that each work on the platform is now textually searchable.

William Wyndaele, historicus en donateur van het Bibliotheekfonds Letteren, schonk zijn privécollectie van ongeveer 2000 hoofdzakelijk moderne wetenschappelijke publicaties aan KU Leuven Bibliotheken. De schenking betekent een welgekomen verrijking voor onze collecties, in de eerste plaats de collectie Geschiedenis, maar ook de collecties Klassieke Studies, Humanistische & Neolatijnse literatuur, Kunstgeschiedenis, Oosterse Studies en Theologie & Religiewetenschappen.

Opening the Future is a collective subscription model for OA books. Libraries can sign up for its membership scheme, which implies that they grow their collections and support Open Access at the same time. The objective is to raise small contributions from a large number of academic libraries, so that no single institution bears a disproportionate burden.

How does it work?

A library subscribes to a backlist package of non-OA books offered by a publisher. The publisher makes this backlist package of non-OA books available to subscribers only (in other words: books in this package remain non-OA), but uses the subscription money to publish new books in OA. These new books are thus made available to everyone in OA, benefitting scholars and institutions around the world.

How it started and how it’s going

Opening the Future was launched by the COPIM project: an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers supported by the Research England Development Fund (REDFund) as a major development project in the Higher Education sector with significant public benefits, and by Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The Central European Press (CEP) piloted this model and was recently joined by the Liverpool University Press. Both programs are funded by  KU Leuven: membership for the  CEP program is financed by KU Leuven Libraries Artes, whereas membership for The Liverpool University Press program is funded via the KU Leuven Fund for Fair OA.

In June 2021 it was announced that Opening the Future has been shortlisted as a finalist for an ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing. ALPSP (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers) is the international trade association which represents non-profit scholarly publishing. The winner of the award will be announced during their annual conference on 15-17 September.

In 2021 KU Leuven Libraries Artes is participating in 5 Evidence Based Acquisition Projects. This results in over 100.000 e-books being accessible for a period of 12 months. At the end of this period, a smaller selection of titles will be acquired (perpetual access) by the library according to collection profiles and in consultation with the academic staff, and (this is why the acquisition method is called evidence based) reinforced by usage statistics. When the EBA Project ends, the library is free to engage for another term of 12 months, thus keeping the larger (not purchased) EBA-collection accessible.

Started in January 2021

Cambridge University Press: full collection* of e-books HSS (CUP + publishing partners)
Cambridge Core – Journals & Books Online | Cambridge University Press (kuleuven.be)

Taylor & Francis (Routledge): defined set of a limited number of preselected titles
Home | Taylor & Francis Group (kuleuven.be)

New from April 2021 onwards

de Gruyter: full collection of e-books (de Gruyter + publishing partners)*
De Gruyter (kuleuven.be)

Brill: full collection of e-books
Brill | Over three centuries of scholarly publishing (kuleuven.be)

Benjamins: full collection of e-books
Books | John Benjamins (kuleuven.be)

*not included: HTML text books, Cambridge Companions, Cambridge Histories

Library Central Services is working hard in order to make all individual titles accessible through Limo. There may, however, be a delay of up to one month in adding newly published titles. In the meantime, those titles can be accessed directly on the publisher’s platform.

The Parthenos Standardization Survival Kit shows how researchers can use a range of tools, methods, and data standards to create a standardized research workflow, depending on their discipline, chosen approach, specific research materials, and so on. What sort of workflow is good for creating 3D reconstructions in archaeology? Or interoperable TEI text resources? What specific tools are other researchers using for data gathering, annotation, or publishing? How are they working with images, texts, or artifacts?

In short, this is great tool to explore concrete ways to make a research project better with standards. You can also add your own workflows.