University of Richmond
AC-11: Open Access to Research

The University of Richmond's Scholarship Repository provides open access to the intellectual content of its faculty, students and many centers and programs. The repository includes a broad spectrum of materials and formats, including written scholarship by faculty and students. Since beginning in 2013, the repository contains more than 13,043 papers, which have been downloaded more than 1,834,789 times (as of 2/26/19). Library staff provide broad support from to gain permission from publishers for inclusion in the repository. The library, including the Law Library, manages and supports the UR Scholarship Repository. The Library seeks all permission for the uploading of faculty publications, enters metadata, and uploads materials. Financial support is provided as requested to make materials open access.

The University of Richmond Scholarship Repository is an open-access compliant institutional repository, with content freely accessible to the world and searchable via Google Scholar and other search engines. The intent of the Scholarship Repository is to reflect the research and scholarly work of the University of Richmond community. All current and emeritus faculty and staff can deposit their work in this repository or have their work added by Library staff. Published and unpublished works of current and emeritus faculty and staff may be uploaded into the repository. Images, video and audio may be uploaded as well. All works in UR Scholarship Repository are publicly available; the only items that may not be available are those under temporary embargo by the publisher or the author. Material in copyright is only posted with the approval of the copyright owner or subject to the doctrine of fair use. The UR Scholarship Repository is organized and made accessible by the University Libraries and William Taylor Muse Law Library.

University of Richmond maintains an institutional scholarship repository in which librarians support the inclusion of faculty publications (books and papers). All permission for the uploading of faculty publications are managed by library staff. This includes the following: 1) conducting thorough copyright review and contacting publishers to establish versions of work to deposit; 2) Uploading works to the UR Scholarship Repository in accordance with funding agency, copyright, and publisher policies; 3) Adding descriptive metadata to enhance the findability of the author's work. Additionally, librarians provide open access education and policy information to faculty. Librarians work with faculty on understanding author rights, copyright, and changes in scholarly publishing. To support these efforts, the library provides a webpage that acts as a clearinghouse for open access information. The Faculty Learning Community New Models for Disseminating Knowledge, which was co-chaired by the Librarian for Scholarly Communications, explored and fostered the many transformations taking place with scholarly publishing, including advocacy of open access publication motivated by issues of equity related to restricting access to a privileged few. The group studied the potential impacts of price barriers and permission barriers in limiting access to scholarly material by our students, colleagues, and community.

Scholarship Repository and Open Access: https://scholarship.richmond.edu/ Faculty Learning Community: https://provost.richmond.edu/faculty-development/faculty-learning-communities/2016-2017%20Communities/new-models.html Information provided by Lucretia McCulley, Librarian for Scholarly Communications