Scholarly Communication is a dynamic landscape, and we are continually evolving. Many scholarly communications activities have spun-off into their own departments, such as VT Publishing and Digital Imaging and Preservation Services, and Digital Library Development. Our focus is on supporting the creation and dissemination of scholarship. We promote public access to (i.e., open) scholarly communication.

VTechWorks is the online repository for the scholarly work of Virginia Tech faculty, students, and staff, and administrative and historical university documents. VTechWorks has open educational resources, journal articles, books, conference papers, slide presentations, technical reports, working papers, patents, administrative documents, videos, images, and much more. ETDs (electronic theses and dissertations) approved by the VT Graduate School are available through VTechWorks too. Faculty can deposit items through EFARS, the university’s Electronic Faculty Activity Reporting System. Google indexes VTechWorks but you can also search and browse full-text within the repository. Monthly data about VTechWorks usage and content is available at VTechWorks Stats.

We promote "open": in that the resources we host and help produce are available to the public. For example, OER (open educational resources) are publicly available instructional materials. See our open textbooks.

Due to our long experience with curating digital resources, we have expertise with copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. We promote identifiers for people (e.g., ORCID) and things (e.g., DOI – Digital Object Identifier, ISSN – International Standard Serial/Book Number, etc.).

VT Libraries offer an open access (OA) fund to subsidize article processing charges (APCs) for scholarly, peer-reviewed articles accepted by OA or hybrid OA journals. Everyone in the Virginia Tech community (i.e., students, staff, and faculty) is eligible for OASF support. Begin by reviewing the VT OASF Guidelines and then completing the Open Access Subvention Fund request form.

Open@VT blog shares many scholarly communication activities, including Open Education Week, Open Data Day, as well as new collections available in VTechWorks.

The Libraries’ sister repositories include VTechData, Special Collections, and others. In addition, we continue to advance scholarly communications through digital libraries development and refinement (e.g., video captioning).

To take advantage of our services and resources, contact any of the Scholarly Communication staff.