Virginia Commonwealth University
AC-11: Open Access to Research

Scholars Compass is a publishing platform for the intellectual output of VCU’s academic, research, and administrative communities. Its goal is to provide wide and stable access to the exemplary work of VCU’s faculty, researchers, students, and staff. VCU Libraries administers and oversees the Scholars Compass.

Scholars Compass hosts content that is produced, submitted, or sponsored by VCU faculty, researchers, or staff, and demonstrates scholarly, educational, or research value. Presentations at professional conferences and publications in scholarly venues from graduate and professional students are encouraged. Other content produced or submitted by VCU students must be sponsored by VCU faculty, researchers, or staff.

Content housed in VCU Scholars Compass can include but is not limited to: published or unpublished faculty research; conference papers and proceedings; presentations, technical reports and working papers; books and book chapters; multimedia; administrative and policy documents; theses and dissertations; data sets; peer-reviewed journals and other series; instructional material and courseware; and software.

VCU and VCU Libraries support Open Access. However, there is no published university-level policy on open access that "requires its employees to publish scholarly works open access or archive final post-peer reviewed versions of scholarly works in an open access repository." The VCU Libraries Faculty Organization passed a Faculty Open Access Resolution in 2012 in support of library faculty making their research freely available whenever possible.

"The Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries faculty believes that open access to scholarship is critical for scholarly communication and for the future of libraries and education. Our local, state, and professional communities cannot be engaged by our scholarship if published in journals that they cannot access. For these reasons we resolve to make our own research freely available whenever possible by seeking publishers that have either adopted open access policies, publish contents online without restriction, and/or allow authors to self-archive their publications on the web. We resolve to link to and/or self-archive our publications to make them freely accessible, negotiating with publishers when necessary to achieve this."

Although the VCU Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund was decommissioned, VCU Libraries has negotiated for coverage of article processing charges within publisher contracts, for example, with the Royal Society of Chemistry and DeGruyter. VCU Libraries, as well as Virginia’s academic library consortium VIVA, continue to seek agreements with publishers that include coverage of APCs for VCU authors.

The VCU Libraries subscription to Royal Society of Chemistry journals includes article processing charges for up to 18 VCU-authored articles each year. If you want to publish an open access article in an RSC journal, view the full guidelines and author instructions.
URL: https://guides.library.vcu.edu/open-access/author-support

"After five years of successfully supporting faculty publications, VCU Libraries’ Open Access Publishing Fund will be decommissioned May 15... The fund is being decommissioned because while this funding has helped to support the publication of more than 100 open access articles, it is not a sustainable or scalable model that will foster strategic changes in the traditional scholarly publication ecosystem. In fact, more than 50 percent of funded APCs were paid to the five large commercial publishers -- Sage, Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer -- which continued at the same time to charge significant subscription fees in addition to enjoying APC revenue for open access journal articles. VCU Libraries joins a growing number of research libraries, including the University of Virginia, that have discontinued open access fund subsidies for these reasons."
URL: https://www.library.vcu.edu/about/news/2020-news/open-access-publishing-funding-stream-ends-may-15.html

VCU Libraries provides open access journal hosting services through which peer-reviewed open access journals are hosted on servers licensed by the university with dedicated staff who provide publishing support at no cost. See the Scholars Compass section for Journals and Peer-Reviewed Series
URL: https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/peer_review_list.html

Portions of this text are attributed to Hillary Miller - Scholarly Communications Librarian, VCU Libraries at Virginia Commonwealth University

https://www.library.vcu.edu/media/vculibrary/documents/policies/FacultyOpenAccessResolution.pdf