Open@VT
Open Access, Open Data, and Open Educational Resources
Support for Open Access at the University Libraries
Welcome to the Open@VT blog, where the focus will be library support for open access (see the links on the upper left) as well as other aspects of openness. Part of the impetus for the blog was the realization that our outreach efforts needed to be year-round and not just focused on Open Access Week, which we held for the first time in October 2012. Library support for OA activities has ramped up significantly in the last couple of years, and now we have a pilot OA publishing (subvention) fund, discounts on article publishing charges as a result of institutional memberships, a new institutional repository for archiving scholarship, VTechWorks, and we host a growing number of OA journals. Virginia Tech was the first university to require ETDs back in 1997, the vast majority of which are openly available. In addition, we provide training through the Faculty Development Institute (FDI) (also open to graduate students) for VTechWorks, data management plans, and open access/copyright. We’ll be examining these efforts in more detail in future blog posts, but in the meantime, please feel free to comment, send me ideas, spread the news, and thanks for your patience as I learn to blog.
I want to suggest clarifying the statement,
“Virginia Tech was the first university to require ETDs back in 1997, the vast majority of which are openly available.”
Probably a large majority of the ETDs submitted after 1997 are open access. However most of the bound theses that DLA has digitized are restricted to campus only. Because of this, according to the latest stats on http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/browse/by_author/, of
20,433 ETDs, 11,117 are unrestricted and 9,233 are restricted to campus only. That’s a majority but not a vast one.
Thanks Anne, I was thinking about the born-digital ones and forgetting about the older ones that are being scanned. I assume the problem there is having to track down authors for permission, whereas permissions are built into the ETD submission process. Seems similar to the orphan works problem with scanned books.