The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. Total student enrollment at UT Austin as of fall 2022 was 52,384, with 41,309 undergraduates, and 11,075 graduate students. The student-to-faculty ratio is 18:1 and 80% of students have in-state residence. UT Austin is a US Department of Education–designated minority-serving institution.
Institutional Alignment
UT Austin’s ambition is to be the world’s highest-impact public research university. According to the report highlighted in this profile, this is only achievable “if the world is able to learn from the knowledge generated here.”
Sustainable Open Scholarship at UT Austin
In December 2021, UT Austin published Sustainable Open Scholarship at The University of Texas at Austin: Report of the Sustainable Open Scholarship Working Group. This report resulted from a yearlong, cross-campus process to develop and articulate strategies to “transform access to information resources in support of the educational and research missions of The University of Texas at Austin.” The Sustainable Open Scholarship (SOS) Working Group grew from a confluence of circumstances, including a provost’s report on the future of libraries, the proliferation of proprietary article/information access that creates impediments to teaching and research, the COVID-19 crisis highlighting the need for rapid access to information, and social justice issues that underscore inequitable access. The SOS Working Group believes these issues make “it imperative that public scholarship is immediately available for all-access, that publishing costs and licensing fees are contained, that data sources are open to researchers, and that authors retain their rights.”
The SOS Working Group’s final report and its recommendations urge UT Austin to embrace open science as a campus-level priority.
The Sustainable Open Scholarship initiative was a faculty-led, campus-wide, cross-disciplinary initiative with four faculty-chaired subcommittees:
- Open Access
- Open Data
- Open Educational Resources
- Licensing and Negotiation
The working group and its subcommittees explicitly linked sustainable open scholarship to inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility, setting the libraries and the university up for greater opportunities to work with underrepresented communities and increase equitable access to digital content. Campus leaders also anticipate more progress towards integrating aspects of open science and social impact into the faculty-review process, and plan to keep making open-science tools more ubiquitous and easier to use.
For additional information about Accelerating Social Impact Research: Libraries at the Intersection of Openness and Community-Engaged Scholarship, please read the ARL report or view additional institutional profiles.
