To strengthen and facilitate French research: this is the goal the Ministry of Higher Education and Research wants to achieve with its ISTEX project. France, along with the rest of the world, has faced huge price increases in the acquisition of academic electronic resources during the last decade, and its institutions are now finding it difficult to pay to access them. The Ministry has therefore decided to invest in an extensive electronic archives acquisition programme in order to give the academic and research community nationwide access to a very large corpus of data in all disciplines. This project will consist of two phases: acquisition of the archives themselves and the development of a single platform to host the data. This platform will offer seamless unique access to all the resources purchased and will provide a range of efficient services to researchers.

Many institutions have been awarded funds by the Research Councils UK (RCUK), in the form of a block grant, to cover the costs of article processing charges (APCs) for open access (OA). This article discusses how this grant (and also the open access fund awarded by the Wellcome Trust) is being managed at the University of Glasgow. It looks at the overall policy for managing these funds at the University and at the systems and processes set in place by the University Library to deal with this new area of activity. There are significant challenges for institutions in managing individual APCs and the article discusses some of these challenges. The new Research Excellence Framework (REF) policy on open access was introduced in March 2014 and will have implications for the management of open access by institutions. Finally, the paper looks at where next for OA management at the University.

At Utrecht University we strongly believe that academic libraries have lost their role in the discovery of scientific information and should focus on delivery instead. Without your own discovery tool you might feel stark naked. However, we have to admit that others can do a better job on discovery, so don’t spend too much time on this. Make a priority of your delivery task and rethink the way you can provide value for your users.

The academic publishing industry is set to celebrate 350 years of peer-reviewed scientific journals. However, there are significant shifts in the practice of scholarship, as scholars and citizens alike participate in an increasingly digital world. Is the scholarly article still fit for its purpose in this data-driven world, with new interdisciplinary methodologies and increasing automation? How might it be enhanced or replaced with new kinds of digital research objects, so as not to restrict innovation but rather create a flourishing sense-making network of humans and machines? The emerging paradigm of social machines provides a lens onto future developments in scholarship and scholarly collaboration, as we live and study in a hybrid physical-digital sociotechnical system of enormous and growing scale.

Open scholarship is one of the most profound influences on the research landscape. It is shaping institutional policy and strategy, changing scholarly behaviour, and raising substantial questions about infrastructure and investment. Whilst undoubtedly challenging, adapting to an open scholarship environment presents enormous opportunities for research organizations and the research management and knowledge and communications professions. This article sets out some of these issues from the perspective of a university research manager.