From service provider to strategic partner: What librarians want from publishers

Author: Robert Hilliker

Director of Library Relations

As libraries and publishers work together to support research and learning, understanding what librarians value in these relationships is essential to building stronger partnerships. At last year's Charleston Conference, my colleagues at Springer Nature launched a global survey to assess librarians' perceptions of scholarly publishers. The objective was to enrich our understanding of what librarians value in their relationship with publishers and to find ways to deepen those relationships by identifying opportunities for collaboration and partnership around shared values.

This post pulls together some of the most interesting results from that survey and explores promising opportunities we see emerging from the data, places where improved collaboration can produce real results.

A global view of library priorities

Ultimately 445 librarians completed the survey, with a truly global distribution, and particularly strong participation from US and Chinese librarians, which makes the regional variation in responses particularly interesting to observe. Even on the core question of the library’s mission there was noteworthy divergence, with APAC librarians emphasizing the importance of the physical library space far more than their counterparts in EMEA and NA, while EMEA librarians placed far more importance on the libraries’ role in open access and scholarly communication than librarians elsewhere.

The role of the libraries in providing timely access to scholarly resources and supporting teaching and learning across the institution were unsurprisingly regarded as uniformly important across all regions. These similarities and differences echoed through the survey results in several interesting ways. 

Perceptions of publisher value

While solid majorities of librarians across all regions recognized publishers as a valuable part of the research ecosystem, APAC librarians had notably more positive perceptions on this point than their North American counterparts, which appears to be aligned with placing a significantly higher value on publishers’ efforts to promote published content, provide impact analysis (including usage statistics), and support their institution and its authors.

NA-based librarians placed a notably higher value on the editorial work done by publishers, including peer review management and integrity checks, as well as the work they do to disseminate and provide access to published content. One respondent from North America highlighted the “extraordinary disruption” facing publishers and academic libraries right now, and their hope “that publishers will concentrate on establishing some stability in platforms (access) and focus on quality of research and dissemination,” since these are functions that cannot be handled by other stakeholders in the scholarly publishing ecosystem. 

Moving beyond a traditional vendor relationship

The value perception gap also appears to correspond with a sense among North American librarians that publishers don’t understand their needs and priorities well, though one of them noted that “publishers vary widely in their understanding of academic library goals and operations” especially with respect to the budget constraints that academic libraries face. This perception gap carries over into their assessment of whether they see publishers as strategic partners aligned with their mission, or solely as service providers meeting their needs, North America was the only region where “service providers” outpaced “strategic partners” as a response, and yet when asked what kind of relationship they would prefer to have with publishers librarians across all regions manifested a very strong preference for strategic partnership. 

The main point of values alignment that librarians identified was around providing access to high-quality information resources that meet user needs, something an EMEA-based librarian noted was “constructive and mutually beneficial” even when publishers “goals don’t fully align with ours.” Similarly, an APAC-based librarian noted that “greater cooperation can play a greater role in social progress” even though “publishers and libraries have different responsibilities.” 

Cost and differing business models were identified by several respondents as points of tension between publishers and libraries. Yet even with those points of tension, a NA-based librarian emphasized that the “significant reconfiguration” of academic research, including “libraries engaging more directly in the publications and distribution of research” has created “significant potential to reframe that library-publisher relationship” so long as trust can be established and maintained between them. 

Working together on shared challenges

So, given that there is a clear capacity for greater partnership and collaboration here, what would academic librarians like to see publishers invest in to further support scientific research? Despite some of the same variation between the regions that we saw elsewhere in the survey results, the top three priorities were consistent: protecting research integrity, expanding open access models and infrastructure, and improving content discovery, search, and publishing platforms. 

As readers of my previous posts on The Link will know, these three issues are very important to me and my colleagues and we have been working to collaborate with librarians and other stakeholders to further our shared goals in these areas, from our deep engagement with the World Conference on Research Integrity to our robust participation in initiatives from NISO, STM, and COPE to develop shared standards that enhance discovery and protect the integrity of scholarly research, to our ongoing investments in improving our platforms and systems (and the data and metadata that underlie them).

I think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what kinds of collaboration are possible with libraries and librarians on these fronts, which is why I’m looking forward to this year’s Charleston Conference, where I expect to have the opportunity to meet with many academic librarians who are eager to see what we can accomplish when we work together on shared challenges.

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• Exploring AI futures in libraries with the Futurescape Workshop community
• Four themes from NASIG 2026 shaping the future of academic librarianship
• Why libraries should focus on AI readiness more than AI adoption
• Institutional perspectives on strengthening research integrity through collaboration

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