Library Collections

In addition to participating in several open access agreements to help reduce or eliminate article publishing charges for Virginia Tech authors, the University Libraries supports a number of open access initiatives that serve the broader academic community. Two of the latest examples of this are detailed below.

Knowledge Unlatched – Knowledge Unlatched has been an important provider of open access books for over a decade. Our library has just made a pledge to support the KU Select 2026 (full collection of 200 OA books). We are also supporting the KU Focus Collection 2026: Digital Lives-Technology’s Influence on Contemporary Life. (20 additional OA books).

Reveal Digital – Featuring collaboratively funded primary sources, Reveal Digital develops and makes collections openly accessible to the world through the JSTOR platform. Having previously support their Independent Voices collection, our library has just made a pledge to support their newest collection, Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements, which documents the history of civil rights movements across different communities.

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.

University Libraries at Virginia Tech is pleased to announce three new transformative agreements to bring read and publish access to journals from Cambridge University Press, the International Water Association (IWA), and the Institute of Physics (IOP). These agreements are available through Virginia Tech’s membership in VIVA, the academic library consortium of Virginia. As a result of these agreements, starting January 1, 2023, corresponding authors at Virginia Tech are now able to publish open access articles in nearly 500 more journals at no cost to the authors. Additionally, the Virginia Tech community has expanded access to be able to read content from these publishers. Information on all of our available open access discounts may be found at https://guides.lib.vt.edu/oasf/discounts