Library Collections

Several new Read and Publish agreements are available through the University Libraries for 2024. These allow Virginia Tech authors to publish their work open access at reduced or no cost.

All new for this year are journal publishing agreements with American Chemical Society, PLOS, and Royal Society of Chemistry.  We were also able to negotiate expanded title coverage with Cambridge University Press and we became an institutional member of PeerJ to streamline the article acceptance process for their journals.

Information on all available discounts and memberships can be found on our Libguide. Please note that for multi-author works the discounts usually only apply to the institutional affiliation of the corresponding author.

Earlier this month JSTOR launched its new Path to Open initiative. Virginia Tech is among over 50 institutions that are supporting this effort financially. While we have long had access to JSTOR subscription databases this is their first foray into Open Access publishing. Members of the Open Knowledge Committee worked with Collections and Technical Services to assess this new model.

This multi-year pilot program provides libraries with affordable access to diverse, high-quality frontlist e-books while supporting small and medium university presses in open access publishing. The collection will grow over time and the books will be converted to open access three years after publication to better support publishers, authors, institutions, and readers worldwide.

The first release contains 100 ebook titles – See https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/titles/ for the full list. These have been loaded into our library discovery system to facilitate access.

HathiTrust’s Copyright Review Program makes available published works no longer protected by copyright. The program reviews US, Canadian, Australian, and UK publications.  While the highest priority is published monographs, many serial and series publications are available.

As of June 1, 2022, HathiTrust’s collection included nearly 1.4 million U.S. federal documents. HathiTrust’s Federal Documents Advisory Committee, among other tasks, explores “methods and operations to characterize, improve, and enhance the quality of federal documents metadata and the HathiTrust digital corpus”

For more information about HathiTrust U.S. federal documents program please visit their information page at https://www.hathitrust.org/usgovdocs

For more about other aspects of the copyright review program see https://www.hathitrust.org/copyright-review

The University Libraries have joined HathiTrust as of July 2012.  HathiTrust has two levels of partnership: sustaining and content-contributing.  As sustaining partners, VT has full viewing and downloading abilities for public domain materials and materials for which HathiTrust has received permissions for downloading.  All HathiTrust holdings are indexed and discoverable through Summon.

IP recognition has been turned on; you can also test Shibboleth authentication.   Click the Login link from the top right or within the pink box, choose Virginia Tech in the Partner Institution dropdown window, and enter your VT PID and password.  To see an example of full-text downloading, search the HathiTrust catalog for the title “Historic Dress in America, 1607-1800” by Elisabeth McClellan, published in 1904.

We plan to send updates about HathiTrust internally as we discover more about it’s features and content.  Notification will go out to the university community after the start of the semester.  In the meantime, please send any questions or comments to me or post them to the blog.