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University Libraries' Support for Open Access Initiatives: Home

University Libraries has long recognized the importance of supporting Open Access (OA) initiatives through our collections budget. In 2021, we committed to steadily increasing the percentage of our budget utilized to support publishers, collections, and systems that seek to remove barriers to accessing and producing scholarly content. This guide highlights some of the initiatives funded through the University Libraries' collections budget, and how support has been distributed over the last several years.

Have questions about our financial support for OA? Please contact Edward Lener (lener@vt.edu)

Director of Collections

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Edward Lener
Contact:
3011 Newman Library
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(540) 231-9249

Supported OA Initiatives

APTrust

In part, the Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust) is a consortium of higher education institutions committed to providing both a preservation solution for digital content and collaboratively developed services related to that content. The APTrust accepts digital materials in all formats from member institutions, and provides redundant storage in the cloud. It is managed and operated by the University of Virginia. The APTrust consortium leverages the expertise of its members to identify and articulate needs for the digital content environment, to prioritize service development, and to collaboratively build solutions.

ArXiv.org

arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 1,962,407 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.

Biomed Central

BMC has an evolving portfolio of some 300 peer-reviewed journals, sharing discoveries from research communities in science, technology, engineering and medicine. 

BioOne Complete

BioOne Complete is a database of more than 200 subscribed and open-access titles in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences.

Demography

Demography presents original research of scholars in a broad range of disciplines that includes anthropology, biology, economics, geography, history, psychology, public health, sociology, and statistics. The journal encompasses a wide variety of methodological approaches to population research. Its geographic focus is global, with articles addressing demographic matters from around the planet. Its temporal scope is broad, as represented by research that explores demographic phenomena from past to present and reaching toward the future.

Ergo

Ergo

Ergo is an open access philosophy journal accepting submissions on all philosophical topics and from all philosophical traditions. This includes, among other things: history of philosophy, work in both the analytic and continental traditions, as well as formal and empirically informed philosophy. Ergo is strongly committed to diversity and especially welcomes submissions from members of groups currently underrepresented in philosophy.

HathiTrust

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.

See also: https://guides.lib.vt.edu/find/hathitrust

Independent Voices

Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.

Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development (JAFSCD) is the world's only peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary journal focused solely on food and farming-related community development. JAFSCD uses a double-blind peer review process, with expert reviewers who include researchers, scholars, and food systems professionals in the field. 

Knowledge Unlatched

Knowledge Unlatched (KU) makes scholarly content freely available to everyone and contributes to the further development of the Open Access (OA) infrastructure. Our online marketplace provides libraries and institutions worldwide with a central place to support OA collections and models from leading publishing houses and new OA initiatives.

MDPI

MDPI has the mission to foster open scientific exchange in all forms, across all disciplines. Our 367 diverse, peer-reviewed, open access journals are supported by more than 115,000 academic experts who support our mission, values, and commitment to providing high-quality service for our authors. We serve scholars from around the world to ensure the latest research is freely available and all content is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

MetaArchive

MetaArchive is a community-owned, community-led initiative comprised of libraries, archives, and other digital memory organizations. Working cooperatively with the Library of Congress through the NDIIPP Program, we have achieved what none of us could have alone: a secure and cost-effective repository that provides for the long-term care of digital materials – not by outsourcing to other organizations, but by actively participating in the preservation of our own content.

Open Book Publishers

Open Book Publishers is an independent academic publisher, run by scholars who are committed to making high-quality research available to readers around the world. We publish monographs and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and offer the academic excellence of a traditional press, with the speed, convenience and accessibility of digital publishing. All our books are available to read for free online.

Open Education Network

The Open Education Network (OEN) is a higher education community working to advance open education.

Open Library of Humanities

The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). We are funded by an international consortium of libraries who have joined us in our mission to make scholarly publishing fairer, more accessible, and rigorously preserved for the digital future.

OpenStax

OpenStax started as an Open Educational Resource (OER) repository where faculty around the world could publish, share, and remix educational materials. We started publishing our own line of free, peer-reviewed textbooks in 2012 to maximize our impact by providing high quality, flexible, turnkey resources for instructors and students at little to no cost.

punctum books

punctum books is an independent open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms. We also take in strays. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.

SCOAP3

SCOAP3 is a partnership of over three thousand libraries, key funding agencies and research centers in 44 countries and 3 intergovernmental organisations. Working with leading publishers, SCOAP3 has converted key journals in the field of High-Energy Physics to Open Access at no cost for authors. SCOAP3 centrally pays publishers for costs involved in providing Open Access, publishers, in turn, reduce subscription fees to all their customers, who can re-direct these funds to contribute to SCOAP3.

Sherpa Romeo

Sherpa Romeo

Sherpa Romeo is an online resource that aggregates and analyses publisher open access policies from around the world and provides summaries of publisher copyright and open access archiving policies on a journal-by-journal basis.

The Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL)

The Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) identifies, acquires, catalogs, digitizes and provides unrestricted access to U.S. government agency technical reports.  TRAIL currently consists of over four dozen member institutions whose annual membership fees and volunteered staff time further the efforts of the project.

Ubiquity Partner Network

The Ubiquity Partner Network (UPN) is made up of fully independent university and society presses. By sharing the same infrastructure and back office services, the presses are able to run cost-efficiently and sustainably. UPN also provides an opportunity to share resources and experience, and to cascade content between presses, all of which result in much greater efficiency. The presses also contribute members to the UPN Steering Board, which determines the direction of the overall platform.

Collections Funding Support for OA 2017-2021