Libraries and research support in small and teaching-led universities: Contextual problems around nascent services in dynamic times

In recent years many academic libraries have been developing research support services. Much of this has emerged in response to the increasing demands and mandates of research funders to manage research data more effectively and to make research publications openly available through either gold or green open access (OA). The exciting prospect of helping to transform research practices by ensuring that there is transparency, accountability and reproducibility has also demonstrated a number of complexities and problems for research support services. In this paper we shall discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for libraries to engage substantively in developing research support services for their higher educational institutions (HEIs) and the wider communities they serve.