The Big Ten Conference is a major U.S. collegiate athletic conference founded in the Midwest USA in 1896 that is famous for its strong sports programs, especially football. Since mid-November 2025, about 55% of all online mentions of the “Big Ten” conference have been football-related. This includes numerous articles on Indiana University’s historic football success in anticipation of its first Rose Bowl appearance since 1968 on January 1, 2026.
It is also an association of leading research universities, with 18 members including recent additions like UCLA, USC, Oregon, and Washington, making it a truly national entity competing in NCAA Division I. The Big Ten is known for its strong academics and rich rivalries, with 5.7 million living alumni and 520,000 current students. Its vast open access library system, which has been called a model of “one collection, shared, and fully networked”, is often described as the BIG Collection. Member libraries’ holdings and services are treated as a coordinated system rather than as isolated campuses.
The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) began in 1958, when Big Ten presidents created an academic counterpart to the athletic conference. Originally called the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), it was renamed the Big Ten Academic Alliance in 2016 to better match its membership and mission. Central to the BTAA is UBorrow, a shared discovery-to-delivery program that gives users rapid access to 90+ million books across BTAA libraries (plus partners like the Center for Research Libraries) that can typically be delivered in about a week.
In parallel, the Alliance has scaled long-term, shared stewardship through its Shared Print Collection, a distributed network that brings together 20+ million unique print titles so members can preserve materials while improving access. On the open-access side of this shared system, BTAA coordinates Open Scholarship agreements and operates initiatives like Big Ten Open Books across the consortium to offer free, openly available titles from Big Ten university presses.
Through its collaboration with the library consortium LYRASIS, the BTAA Libraries have pooled member resources to directly fund non-APC (“diamond”) open access publishing. A clear example is BTAA’s collective action agreement supporting the LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP). The 15 BTAA member libraries jointly invested $45,000 into OACIP’s general fund to finance open-access content, including diamond OA journals such as Algebraic Combinatorics, History of Media Studies, and the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. In practice, this partnership turns open scholarship values into a shared, predictable funding mechanism that helps keep journals free for both authors and readers.
BTAA and LYRASIS have also worked together on broader, multi-organization efforts to strengthen U.S. infrastructure for diamond OA. In a joint statement with the California Digital Library (CDL) on April 18, 2024, the three organizations committed to “go further together” on diamond OA, noting existing collaboration on collective funding programs, increased adoption of persistent identifiers, and support for open infrastructure services that improve discovery and access. That collaboration advanced again on November 19, 2025, when BTAA’s Center for Library Programs partnered with LYRASIS and CDL on a $206,886 Gates Foundation grant to launch Mapping U.S. Diamond Open Access Journals, a project intended to advance community-governed scholarly publishing and scheduled to run through February 2027.
Thanks to Lyrasis for contributing to this blurb.
About the Big Ten Academic Alliance:
The Big Ten Academic Alliance is the nation’s preeminent model for effective collaboration among research universities. For more than half a century, these world-class institutions have advanced their academic missions, generated unique opportunities for students and faculty, and served the common good by sharing expertise, leveraging campus resources and collaborating on innovative programs. Governed by the provosts of the member universities, the Big Ten Academic Alliance coordinates shared programs and initiatives through its Champaign, Illinois headquarters. The fifteen world-class libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance include Indiana University, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, University of Illinois, University of Iowa, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Chicago.
