Imagine you are submitting a research paper on Friday afternoon. Before clicking “submit”, you need to answer several questions. Does your funder require open access? Does your institution have a transformative agreement with the publisher? Which licence should you choose? Should you deposit your accepted manuscript in the institutional repository? Do you also need to share your research data?
The questions aren’t difficult but finding the answers is.
As open research becomes part of everyday research practice, this challenge is only growing. New funder requirements, publisher policies and institutional procedures are added every year and researchers are expected to navigate them, even though the information is scattered across multiple sources
This is where libraries can make a real difference.
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Our role is no longer only to promote open access or explain individual policies. Increasingly, it is to connect institutional knowledge so researchers can move through the research life cycle with confidence.
Before redesigning research support, it is worth looking at the experience from a researcher’s perspective. A few simple questions can help identify where improvements are needed:
- What questions do researchers ask most often?
- Can they find every answer from one starting point?
- Does each page explain what to do next?
- Who is responsible for keeping the guidance up to date?
Shift the focus from services to researchers
Our university library began its open science journey in 2013, with the launch of one of Kazakhstan’s first institutional repositories. Today, it preserves more than 17,000 research outputs. As our research support services expanded to include open access, research data management, copyright guidance, publishing support and researcher training, our mindset shifted.
Libraries often organise information around the services they provide. Researchers, however, do not think in terms of repositories, copyright or research data management. They think in terms of the decisions they need to make:
- Where should I publish?
- Can I publish open access?
- Do I need to share my research data?
- Which licence should I choose?
- How can I comply with my funder’s requirements?
Organising support around these decision points, rather than around institutional departments or library services, creates a far more intuitive experience. Instead of expecting researchers to navigate the university’s administrative structure, libraries can guide them through the research life cycle in the order that decisions naturally arise.
Bring the pieces together
Most universities already have excellent research support resources but they are usually distributed across multiple offices and websites.
We addressed this challenge by creating a library research support office that brought together previously scattered services into a single researcher-centred hub. Instead of expecting researchers to navigate multiple websites and administrative units, we created a one-stop entry point for research support.
Rather than maintaining separate pages for individual topics, research librarians developed a unified resource that brings together institutional policies, publisher guidance, library services and trusted external resources. The goal is simple: researchers should spend less time searching for information and more time conducting research.
A single entry point helps researchers access open access research guidance without having to navigate multiple webpages. Organising guidance around the decision points researchers are making creates a more intuitive and seamless experience, enabling researchers to find the right information at the right time.
The guide continues to evolve as policies change, new services are introduced and researchers raise new questions. Treating it as a living resource has been just as important as creating it in the first place. Regular updates ensure that researchers can rely on it as a trusted and current source of guidance.
Make guidance actionable
Providing information is only part of the job. Researchers also need clear, practical next steps. Guidance should not only explain policies and requirements but direct researchers to the appropriate tools, services, contacts and resources needed to take action.
Where possible, we combine guidance with practical support. Link directly to consultation requests, repository deposit pages, relevant services and expert contacts so researchers can move seamlessly from finding information to taking action. The fewer places they need to search, the easier it becomes to adopt good open research practices.
Build it collaboratively
Open research is not owned by one department or office. Research administration, repositories and research data services from the library can all manage policies, and different committees can control legal or ethics guidance. Libraries are ideally positioned to bring these contributions together, not because they own every service, but because organising knowledge and connecting people with information has always been one of our core strengths.
A collaborative approach also makes it easier to keep guidance current as funder requirements, publisher policies and institutional practices continue to evolve.
Helping researchers spend less time searching and more time researching
The success of a research guide is not measured by the number of pages it contains but by how quickly researchers can find the answers they need and act on them.
Libraries do not necessarily need to create more content. Often, the greatest value lies in bringing existing resources together, making them easier to navigate and presenting them in the order researchers need them.
As open research continues to evolve, helping researchers navigate that complexity could become one of the library’s most valuable contributions. Organising knowledge has always been what libraries do best. In the age of open research, this is no longer just books and papers – it is the institution’s knowledge itself.
Assemgul Temirkhanova is library director; Yelizaveta Kamilova is head of the library research support office; and Lazzat Arystanova and Ainash Yeleussizova are both research librarians, all at Nazarbayev University.
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