Libra: Search and submit

Libra is the University of Virginia’s open access institutional repository, the online archive of scholarship created by the University community. It provides a central, stable location for the scholarly output of the University community (journal articles, datasets, theses/dissertations, etc.). Anyone can search, view and download content. For questions or feedback, contact us: libra@virginia.edu

Submit your work

Learn about Libra

Libra provides stable, central, open access to publicly available content such as journal articles, monographs, conference proceedings, presentations, posters, reports, pre-prints. It also contains data and other products of research, as well as UVA theses and dissertations. 

Libra is made up of three repositories: LibraOpen, LibraETD, and LibraData (or UVA Dataverse).

About LibraOpen

LibraOpen is a scholarly repository that puts your UVA research center stage. LibraOpen accepts an ever-growing range of scholarly output and creates an immediate, persistent, worldwide-discoverable URL (a DOI - Digital Object Identifier) for your work.

LibraOpen is a repository where researchers can make journal articles immediately available in order to comply with federal funder mandates in the OSTP Nelson Memo.

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About LibraETD

Electronic dissertations and masters’ theses have been deposited in the Libra scholarly repository at the University of Virginia since 2012. Libra makes UVA scholarship available to the world and provides safe and secure storage for the scholarly output of the UVA community. Submitting your work to Libra is a graduation requirement for all graduate students whose programs have required theses, and is recommended for all students, undergraduate or graduate, whose programs have optional theses or capstones.

About LibraData

LibraData is a place for UVA researchers to share data, software, and other products of research publicly. The LibraData repository is UVA’s local instance of Dataverse, which was developed at and is used by Harvard University.

LibraData is a repository where researchers can make research outputs publicly available in order to comply with federal funder and journal publisher sharing requirements. LibraData aligns with the Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting from Federally Funded or Supported Research (PDF) and as such is an acceptable repository choice to include in Data Management and Sharing plans.

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UVA OA guidelines

The University of Virginia Faculty Senate voted in May 2021 to endorse a set of Open Access Guidelines describing best practices for making research openly available. The Guidelines encourage each faculty member to take advantage of the University's copyright ownership policy in order to make scholarly works freely available via Libra, UVA’s Institutional Repository. Faculty are also encouraged to make preprint versions, research data, and software freely available in appropriate repositories, with open licenses and in reusable formats, to the extent possible and consistent with other obligations (including University policies). For more information, see University of Virginia Faculty Senate Open Access Guidelines and Recommendations.

Copyright essentials

Copyright law governs many uses of scholarly and other creative works. Getting to know a few key copyright concepts will serve you well as you prepare and pursue publication of your scholarly work, whether it’s a website, a journal article, a book chapter, a thesis or dissertation.