The University Library supports national and international initiatives to transform how scholarship is communicated—from eliminating journal subscription costs to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in publishing. These initiatives are listed here.
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics
The mission of Authors Alliance is to advance the interests of authors who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly. They create resources to help authors understand and enjoy their rights and promote policies that make knowledge and culture available and discoverable.
A collaboration of the world’s leading academic publishers and research libraries, CLOCKSS provides a sustainable dark archive to ensure the long-term survival of digital scholarly content. The library uses CLOCKSS for the preservation of journals and conferences published through the Digital Press.
The library is a supporting partner of C4DISC (Coalition for Diversity & Inlusion in Scholarly Communications) and has adopted their Joint Statement of Principles, which promote diversity and inclusive practices in the scholarly communications ecosystem.
The library is a member of COAR, an international association that brings together the repository community to build capacity, align policies and practices, and act as a global voice for the repository community.
Iowa State University Library is a member of CrossRef, a not-for-profit membership organization that works to make research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess.
The Iowa State University Library has signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) to support and improve the methods by which scientific research is evaluated. DORA recognizes the need to improve the research evaluation process, especially as it pertains to tenure and promotion for faculty.
DOAB is a discovery service for peer reviewed open access books and book publishers that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed books.
DOAJ is a community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals.
Dryad is an open data publishing platform and a community committed to the open availability and routine re-use of all research data.
engrXiv (engineering archive) is dedicated to the dissemination of engineering knowledge quickly and efficiently.
This nonprofit corporation offers a platform and services to journals that are free to read and publish in.
HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.
The Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS) is a cohort of colleges and universities committed to collective action to advance open scholarship within and across their campuses. Leaders from US colleges and universities have joined this community of practice, working together to promote a more transparent, inclusive, and trustworthy research ecosystem.
Signatories of the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication support dissemination of research results for the full benefit of society, the protection of national infrastructures for publishing locally relevant research, and promoting language diversity in research assessment, evaluation, and funding systems.
Knowledge Futures Group is a 501c3 nonprofit building open source technology and collaborating with communities of practice to design and build the public digital infrastructure needed for effective, equitable, and sustainable knowledge futures.
Knowledge Unlatched (KU) makes scholarly content freely available to everyone and contributes to the further development of the Open Access (OA) infrastructure.
Lever Press is a scholarly press supported by more than 50 liberal arts supporting institutions that publish peer-reviewed, born digital, open access monographs at no cost to their authors. It arose from an initiative of the Oberlin Group of Libraries that explored how liberal arts colleges could offer new and compelling alternatives to existing models of scholarly publishing.
Libraria is a collective of researchers based in the social sciences who, drawing on the expertise of librarians, publishers, and other stakeholders, seek to bring about a more open, diverse, community-controlled scholarly communication system.
The library is a member of the Library Publishing Coalition, an independent, community-led membership association of academic and research libraries engaged in scholarly publishing.
Direct to Open harnesses collective action to support open access to excellent scholarship.The model will open access to all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections (~90 titles per year) from 2022 via recurring participation fees
The Iowa State University Library signed the Expression of Interest to support OA2020 in 2018 with the support of the Faculty Senate Executive Board. With OA2020, Iowa State joins a growing number of researchers, libraries, and organizations that share the goal of making research articles freely available.
The LYRASIS Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP) provides a community-driven framework that enables multiple stakeholders to evaluate and collectively fund Diamond Open Access (OA) journals.
Journals supported through OACIP:
The Iowa State University Digital Press is a member of OASPA. Representing a diverse community of organizations engaged in open scholarship, OASPA works to encourage and enable open access as the predominant model of communication for scholarly outputs.
The Open Library of Humanities (OLH) is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges (APCs). The OLH publishing platform supports academic journals from across the humanities disciplines, as well as hosting its own multidisciplinary journal. Iowa State University Library is a higher-tier supporter of OLH.
The Open Research Library plans to be a hosting and discovery service for all open access books.
The Open Textbook Network is a community that promotes access, affordability, and student success through open education.
A collective subscription model that, through its membership scheme, makes library funds go further: achieving the dual objectives of increasing collections and supporting Open Access.
Presses supported through Opening the Future:
ORCiD provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. Through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, it can link you and your professional activities to ensure that your work is recognized. Register now!
PCI is a non-profit organization of researchers providing peer review evaluations of preprints and recommendations to open access journals.
Portico is a community-supported preservation archive that safeguards access to e-journals, e-books, and digital collections.
Punctum Books is an independent queer- and scholar-led, community-formed, and peer-reviewed open-access book (OA) publisher devoted to academic and para-academic authors working in any field in the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, and architecture & design who want to publish books that are genre-queer and genre-bending and which take experimental risks with the forms and styles of intellectual writing.
RDAP is an independent non-profit professional associated for information professionals committed to creating, maintaining, advancing, and teaching best practices for research data, access, and preservation.
Reveal Digital works to make 20th-century primary sources from underrepresented groups openly available on the web. Materials are chosen from a variety of institutions and collections, digitized, and presented on the web for use by scholars and the general public. Libraries provide support for this important work.
Collections supported through Reveal Digital:
- Behind the Scenes of the Civil Rights Movements
- Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920s
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) works to enable the open sharing of research outputs and educational materials in order to democratize access to knowledge, accelerate discovery, and increase the return on our investment in research and education.
The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) is a group that works with publishers to convert peer-reviewed High-Energy Physics (HEP) journals to open access at no cost to authors.
Subscribe to Open” (S2O) is a pragmatic approach for converting subscription journals to open access—free and immediate online availability of research—without reliance on either article processing charges (APCs) or altruism. The University Library is a participant in the S20 Community of Practice.
Thoth is a metadata creation, management, and dissemination platform specifically tailored to tackle the problems of getting open access publications into the book supply chain.
Fund to Mission demonstrates a return to the origins of the university press movement and moves toward a more open, sustainable infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. Our goal is to convert our new monographs program so that in 2023 at least 75% of the U-M Press monographs published that year are open access, without any author ever having to pay.