Some directors of academic libraries participate in the working group, including Director of the LU Library, Mārīte Saviča. While working on the strategy, the working group discussed various issues. M. Saviča proposed to discuss and emphasized the great importance of open science and citizen science direction, and also shared her experience about the LibOCS project and its goals and expected results.

Several years have passed since the previous strategy, experienced global crises in the world in political and socio-economic fields. These challenges have also affected the development of the library field in Latvia, so there was a need to develop a new strategy.

This strategic document sets new goals for the period until 2027 in order to ensure the sustainability of the library field in institutional, as well as legal aspects at the national level. This document incorporates one important course of action, which is directly related to the operation and functions of academic libraries, in order to improve the development of services to support research and science.

In the following years, the goal has been set to develop academic libraries as information and service centers supporting education and science. In order to realize this goal, it is necessary to implement significant improvements and innovations in the field of digital services in the work of academic libraries, as well as to improve such an important function for university libraries, like the use and development of research evaluation systems.

One point in this plan is to support the open science and open education initiative by further developing the management of research data and repositories. An important task of libraries, indicated in the document, is also to make research results more close to the public by engaging in science communication activities. The strategy also emphasizes that libraries should continue to support and promote the availability of scientific publication and other research results in an open access, as well as support the initiative of open science and open education. In order to bring the values of open science to life in the work of library specialists, the following directions of action have been determined:

Popularize open science resources as resources equivalent to subscribed e-resources in education and research.

Promote cooperation with publication and data repository aggregators and registries OpenAire, CORE, BASE, re3data.org, etc.

Promote citizen science as a method of participation in the open science and education community.

Academic libraries in Latvia have been successfully implementing open access issues for several years, but a new challenge for all types of libraries: both academic and public, in the future period until 2027, will be related to how to promote the initiative of citizen science to be more understandable to a wider audience, ensuring the transfer of knowledge and strengthening the role of citizen science in research and community life.