Open Access Initiatives
Supporting Open Access in sustainable and scalable ways is deeply important to VIVA libraries. The VIVA Open Access Task Force, started in 2021, has given special focus to this issue for the VIVA shared collections, including developing the following Umbrella Values for the consortium to apply when considering statewide OA models:
- Equity
- Sustainability
- Transparency
- Openness to experimentation and speculative models
- Support a wide variety of open models (journals, monographs, OER, preprint archives, etc.)
Specific expectations and goals for VIVA OA deals include the following:
- All journal titles from a given publisher should be included in an OA deal. If there is to be a subset, it should be easy to understand and intuitive to faculty authors.
- Research grant funds should be included, where possible, so that libraries are not responsible for all OA publishing costs.
- If there is a merged read and publish deal, there should be a migration of costs over time away from reading and toward publishing as there is more OA in the environment.
- Administrative staff time should be minimal and meaningful.
- Having Virginia authors’ content be open is important, but libraries should not have to pay a new, large sum of money to make this possible, especially with regard to hybrid OA.
- Any additional costs for APCs should be minimal, particularly in cases where it is not an issue of containing existing statewide costs and no research grant funding can be incorporated.
- A firm cap on the top end of costs, regardless of eventual total publishing, is important to ensuring commitment.
Specific initiatives are linked on the left.
