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Content housed in VCU Scholars Compass can include but is not limited to: published or unpublished faculty research; conference papers and proceedings; presentations, technical reports and working papers; books and book chapters; multimedia; administrative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 (https://www.library.vcu.edu/media/vculibrary/documents/policies/FacultyOpenAccessResolution.pdf):

"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."

In 2020, VCU Libraries joined many research libraries in decommissioning its Open Access Publishing Fund after determining it was not a sustainable or scalable model that will foster strategic changes in the traditional scholarly publication ecosystem. (https://www.library.vcu.edu/about/news/2020-news/open-access-publishing-funding-stream-ends-may-15.html)

Since that time, VCU Libraries and VIVA (Virginia’s academic library consortium) have negotiated agreements with individual publishers (sometimes referred to as “read and publish” agreements or transformative open access agreements) that achieve the same aims as an open access publishing fund by providing VCU authors with full coverage for open access article processing charges (APCs). VCU Libraries and VIVA continue to seek agreements with publishers that include coverage of APCs for VCU authors. The list of current agreements can be found at: https://guides.library.vcu.edu/open-access/author-support

VCU Libraries is also a member and supporting institution of organizations that advocate for and support sustainable publishing infrastructure for open access books, journals, and educational resources. This includes the Open Library of Humanities and SCOAP3, whose journals have no APCs because their costs are covered by supporting institutions like VCU Libraries.

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: 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