Participants in the OA Switchboard NYC Summit

Columbia Libraries was thrilled to host the third annual OA Switchboard NYC Summit in March 2026. Collection Analysis Librarian Katherine Brooks, Head of Open Scholarship Esther Jackson and OA Switchboard Executive Director Yvonne Campfens welcomed colleagues from American Institute of Physics (AIP) Publishing, American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Publishing, the American Physiological Society, Rockefeller University Press, ConsortiaManager, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, TNQ, PLOS and IntelligenceBeyond for conversations that centered on the OA Switchboard roadmap and scholarly publishing more broadly.

Attendees discussed scholarly identifiers such as DOI, ORCID and ROR, trends in metadata quality and completeness, and the collaborative Data Quality Challenge with best practices for both publishers and institutions. ConsortiaManager provided a demonstration of their product used to manage and publicize organizational open access publishing agreements, which is similar to the Journal Search Tool (JST) recently licensed by Columbia Libraries to share information about the campus-wide open access publishing agreements provided by the Libraries.

Brooks and Jackson had the opportunity to share the OA strategy of Columbia Libraries, and emphasized that we continue to prioritize read and publish deals that are cost-neutral and have predictable cost increases year over year.

Publishers discussed future strategies for licensing their content in today’s AI-centric environment. We had a lively discussion within the entire group about AI training on copyrighted content and how each constituency was approaching this complicated topic. Given the limited time together, no consensus was reached about the best path forward, but the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is of particular interest, due to its ability to provide interoperability and access between AI systems and corpora of information prepared (vectorized) for large language models (LLMs).

The Summit, which provided local colleagues the chance to connect in more intimate and focused conversation, serves as a reminder that in the project of scholarly publishing, libraries, publishers and service providers must develop and sustain open channels of frank and collegial conversation for the benefit of our different – yet overlapping – core users, including researchers publishing their work through scholarly journals.