Open Access Support
The library believes in the open dissemination of research and scholarship whenever possible, to spread knowledge and allow that knowledge to be built upon. The library supports the Hollins community in making materials open access through the creation and maintenance of institutional repositories, and also financially supports third parties who curate open access resources that will be of use to the Hollins community. (The library includes thousands of such open access resources in its discovery system and course guides).
Projects
Ongoing
Annual Review in Public Health (a Subscribe to Open subscription)
- Hollins instituted a new public health major in 2020, and this “Subscribe to Open” opportunity offers us the ability to both support the new major and bring more open resources to a discipline focused on social justice.
Cambridge University Press (Transformative Agreement)
The library joined a transformative agreement with Cambridge University Press in 2023 to expand Hollins’ online access to include all of CUP’s 400+ journals, and to allow Hollins authors to publish open access articles within CUP’s journals at no additional cost. The arrangement was made possible through the library’s membership in VIVA, the state academic library consortium, which negotiated the “read and publish” agreement. Instead of the traditional subscription, where Hollins only pays for “read” access to journals, this agreement also enables any Hollins faculty member to publish an accepted article open access (thus increasing the reach of the scholarship) in a CUP journal, at no extra charge.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- Like many libraries, our library is greatly dependent on the work of the DOAJ to review and vet open access scholarly journals, making this a key piece of infrastructure enabling us to confidently recommend thousands of DOAJ-recognized open access publications to our community and to include those journals in our discovery system.
- Letter of appreciation from DOAJ
Environmental Humanities (an OA journal)
- Faculty at Hollins strive to engage students with interdisciplinary courses, and this journal supports that work by connecting the humanities and social sciences with environmental studies.
- Hollins takes great pride in its liberal arts identity and mission, and appreciates the opportunity to provide support for publishing open access monographs embodying and reflecting the values of the liberal arts, via a press governed by its supporting members.
Hollins’ institutional and long-standing interest in the “book” and its future, and Hollins’ commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, make this independent, non-profit, queer- and scholar-led, and peer-reviewed open-access publisher an excellent match for our support. Punctum seeks to push boundaries with “books that are genre-queer and genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing,” and DEI is a foundational commitment for them.
Springer OA books (a Lyrasis initiative)
- The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals represent a call to action across issues of significant interest to the Hollins community, such as gender equality, reduced inequalities, and peace and justice.
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Independent Voices (from Reveal Digital)
- This open access digitization project of mid-20th century counterculture press publications, completed in 2018, brings voices from historically marginalized populations to the fore and into the research projects of our students, who long sought access to these voices to center them in their work.
- Hollins, with its strong creative writing program and emphasis on the humanities, has long valued the monograph, and our contribution to this early open access book initiative expressed our support for new models for book publication and distribution.