The post below was originally published in 2023 and has been updated for Open Access Week by Scholarly Repository Librarian Sherry Lake.
The theme for Open Access Week 2024 is a continuation of 2023’s “Community over Commercialization,” focusing on prioritizing approaches to open scholarship that serve the best interests of the public and the academic community.
Library communities have long sought to facilitate the sharing of knowledge — they lessen financial barriers, seek to understand their audiences, and encourage discovery and innovation. The UVA Library supports quite a few programs to this end, and aims to facilitate open publishing through tools, assistance, and the power of the academic community.
Specifically, the Library provides publishing platforms, specialty consultations, publisher arrangements, and general assistance that aim to ease broad access to academic material. You can read more about each of these below, and as you consider your own work we encourage you to contact us — we’re always happy to help.
Publishing platforms
Peer-reviewed open access press: Aperio
Aperio supports open access publishing of journals, monographs, open textbooks, and other educational resources. Proposals are accepted on a rolling basis and evaluated quarterly. Find out more about publishing with Aperio.
Institutional repository: Libra
Libra provides a stable, discoverable location for scholarship of all kinds. A perfect place for student works, theses and dissertations, datasets, journal articles, and much more, Libra ensures your work is discoverable in Virgo to the UVA community and beyond. Find out more about publishing with Libra.
Platform for open educational resources: Pressbooks
Pressbooks is online software used by authors, publishers, and educational institutions around the world, to create easy-to-access text material. Books hosted in Pressbooks are usable on devices of any kind and accessible from anywhere. Find out more about publishing with Pressbooks.
Copyright reference and consultation
Copyright law relates to scholarly and creative works in a number of ways, whether you’re reusing existing material or considering how best to steward your own work. The Library offers online reference about copyright and its intersection with scholarship, in addition to expertise from Library staff. Email lb-scholcomm@virginia.edu if you have questions, or visit Copyright Essentials for Scholarly Work to get started.
Publisher arrangements for open access subsidies
The UVA Library, alongside VIVA (Virginia’s academic library consortium), has negotiated arrangements with a number of publishers to subsidize costs associated with open access publishing. Those relationships currently include the Association of Computing Machinery, Cambridge University Press, Electrochemical Society, International Water Association, Open Library of the Humanities, Rockefeller University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, and Wiley. To learn more, review details of each arrangement or contact a subject liaison to help identify the best opportunity for your work.
At the heart of the Library
The tools above and more are covered on the Library’s website, and the Library’s offerings continue to evolve as the publishing world changes.
For help getting started, reach out to lb-scholcomm@virginia.edu or Ask a Librarian — the power of UVA’s Library community just might get your work exactly where it needs to be.