So the context is a very Dutch context maybe. In Utrecht, my university in the Netherlands, the board has made open science one of its primary principles of the strategy for the coming years.

The motto is open mind, open attitude, open science. And with the star you can see it's one of the pillars. Utrecht University's vision is that the world will be a better place

if open science practices are the norm in research. Open is the key word. Open attitudes towards partnerships, societal parties and the broader public. Seek interaction and openly share new knowledge like research data, publications but also new formats

with a wide audience in society. Professor Frank Miedema, the chair of our university's open science program puts it this way. Science needs a new contract with society. Researchers need to get out of their ivory tower and engage.

This always reminds me now of the British Bake Off where there's somebody who says, bakers bake. Frank Miedema says, researchers engage. Of course, libraries and especially university libraries

have been advocating for open access to scientific publications for I think over 20 years now. This really got momentum in my mind about five or seven years ago when this ambition became part of the agenda of policymakers

and even politicians, especially true in Europe, also with the European Commission and certainly in the Netherlands. At that point, open access to publications became part of open science, a much broader concept including sharing research data,

not just publications, open educational materials, open peer review, public engagement, not only to share knowledge and new knowledge with the broader public but also get the research questions from society, not just global issues but also questions from the regions.

So interaction with the broader public and of course we're now working on abolishing journal impact factors for research quality assessment and that is a real challenge. Open access to knowledge of course is at the core of every library's mission.

I would say all around the world, not just in the Netherlands or in Germany but everywhere. This is why we exist, this is our added value, provide access to information, whatever kind of information to citizens.

It is crucial, we would also say here in Europe, for a democratic society, the informed citizens. Public libraries are very involved in this but I believe university libraries also have this public mission.

So open access to knowledge, of course this is our ultimate dream of libraries. Everything open on the internet for free for everyone around the world. Okay, but what if this dream, let's say in the future, has come true? What do we do then? What is our role?

Because even today our job is also challenged. Open access is part now of contracts with publishers that we used to have for reading rights and I must confess sometimes I'm confused

if there's a challenge between the priority of furthering open access or reading rights as a librarian. What should be my priority? It's not so easy. Germany and also the Netherlands and in general more Europe is far ahead sometimes in this arena than maybe other parts of the world.

So we still need to provide access and this is one of the questions that we face today. There's another issue.

At the core of all our missions I believe is providing access. What if there's another party that has a mission that could easily be ours? How do we relate to that? How do we consider the added value that libraries provide to society?

Let's take a look at some of our missions and this is the mission of the university library in Utrecht. It's part of the mission. Researchers, lecturers and students have a reliable partner in the library in the area of scholarly information.

Librarians use their expertise to contribute to the constant improvement of the scholarly communication cycle. So we have already broadened our mission from be responsible for scholarly information providing to we're active in this area

and we also help researchers to publish in open access basically. Another example, the mission of the New York Public Library is to inspire lifelong learning, advancing knowledge and strengthen our communities. And I believe if we take many more examples

you will always find furthering of knowledge, providing access and also engage for the benefit of our communities. We're all about that. So to investigate our role in future, looking at how the world is developing,

my library is currently engaging in scenario planning and here's where the questions start and where we do not have answers yet. But this is how we go about that. We use the question how the scholarly communication cycle

will develop in the coming ten years. And we use two axes and you see them here on the screen. The first one is restricted, unrestricted. And this is about will the digital world truly become and stay an open global environment

or will we get a European internet, a China internet, etc. Will researchers really be able and increasingly be able to collaborate globally

or will there be restrictions? Think about privacy issues, think about digital safety or geopolitical boundaries. So that's one X. The other one is public-private and I think you can all relate to that.

What if the public domain keeps the grip on the production of research and knowledge? Or what if the private world gets the monopoly?

Look at all the discussions of course about the vaccines and it's in the newspaper every day. We have chosen these axes because we believe that they will have an impact on research and the production of knowledge and also the sharing of knowledge

and therefore also have an impact on libraries. And I want to discuss a little bit two of those scenarios with you. Not all four because we don't have time and we want some things to be examined in the future still. The first one is if the world stays global,

a digital global world, and the public domain has the monopoly, we will work in a UNESCO knowledge cloud. If the private world gets the monopoly, we will all work in a Google cloud.

Research will be dominated and funded by private parties. So these are extremes of course. If you work with scenarios, you want to examine, and I like this metaphor, all the corners of the room. So you look at the extremes and then relate to that.

And to be perfectly clear, scenarios are not predictions of the future. They are extreme options to investigate the future. So let me investigate a few options.

What if researchers will work in a UNESCO open cloud worldwide in the digital arena? By the way, the assumption is the digital world is crucial for research. So this is all about the digital world.

What might be our roles? We might become a publisher. The traditional publishers will have a very diminished role. Open science practices will be implemented everywhere, so libraries might get that role of publisher.

We also might be the parties that provide platforms for publishing for different disciplines, interdisciplinary research. We might also be the party that helps everyone basically,

users, writers and users, producers and readers, how to use this cloud. We might also become knowledge translators. I believe there is already some people who think

that public libraries should translate scientific knowledge for the general public. What will be, I believe, certainly something that we all will be doing is support lifelong learning. This is also something in the Netherlands at least that universities embrace,

and this is certainly something I think that starts when you are born, when you come to the public library, and that will be supported by all libraries that you encounter then in your life. We will be virtual collection builders, maybe,

because we don't need collections anymore. Remember, all knowledge is free on the internet. No collection anymore. Library without a collection. But we might make other types of selections, maybe, because people will drown otherwise. Well, you might agree with these options or not at all.

That's fine. These are just ideas at this point, and there might be many others. The other scenario where the private domain will have taken control, the library will have or will be a Google Library lounge.

That's what we envisioned. Like the lounge in the airport, the nicest one is from Google. Libraries will still exist. We will still exist, of course, because we've been around for thousands of years, so we will be there, but the question is what we'll be doing.

We will absolutely still be the cultural heritage keepers, we believe. In all scenarios, we will be that. Here, it might be one of the elements that becomes more important because we have maybe a slightly smaller role.

We might also be president of the World Ethical Board when it comes to knowledge and knowledge dissemination. Libraries are good at that, probably. And it might also be true that there are some people who say, well, we do not want to work in the Google Cloud. We don't want to do research that's funded by the private world.

We want to have our separate corner, and we might become a niche. Again, agree or disagree, that's all fine. You see the logos of IFLA, EPLIBA, LIBER, and we might also add others.

I put them there because these are two scenarios where the world certainly is global. So as libraries, I believe, we need to collaborate on a global scale, and we need to be visible on that global scale. If we deal with big tech companies that operate worldwide,

we also need this digital global presence. And this is basically where I would like to leave you with all these questions,

and also maybe with these two axles to think about, and to think about what that might mean for your library. We're at the stage in Utrecht where we have not yet defined what this means for the library. We will be discussing this within the university at different levels, with researchers, with the board, et cetera,

to define what the library should do in the next coming years. Thank you very much.