The story below was updated for 2024: read more about open publishing at UVA!
This year’s theme for Open Access Week is “Community over Commercialization,” and it’s easy for those of us at the Library to understand the connection between community and the power of the dissemination of knowledge.
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 and general assistance, and publisher arrangements 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 theses and dissertations, datasets, and journal articles, 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 housing deep expertise from Library staff. Email ul-copyright-team@collab.itc.virginia.edu to request a consultation, 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 lib-scholarship@virginia.edu or Ask a Librarian — the power of UVA’s Library community just might get your work exactly where it needs to be.
