Our Commitment to Open Scholarship

The ULS supports systems of scholarly communication that are as open as possible, with the fewest barriers to access and use. Open scholarship is an intentionally broad frame that includes traditional texts such as scholarly journals and books, as well as data, code, research protocols, and other artifacts that comprise the research enterprise. Openness provides many benefits to researchers and society as a whole:

Research is accelerated by rapid access to current findings
Equity is promoted by removing barriers to access at global scale
Economic fairness is supported by eliminating exorbitant licensing and publishing fees for outputs of research that have already been funded
Public health is bolstered when researchers can easily share data and collaborate
Reproducibility is encouraged through direct access to data and protocols
Long-term availability is facilitated by widespread availability of content with clear use permissions

For readers and researchers at Pitt and worldwide, the ULS supports the ability to access Open Access content by:

Making agreements with publishers and vendors that use Open Access publication models, including Subscribe to Open, making more scholarship, including Pitt scholarship, immediately available to all.
Investing in the open and shared scholarly infrastructure that underpins enduring access to scholarly communication.
Operating Pitt Open Library Publishing, a library-based scholarly publishing program which publishes over 30 diamond (no-fee to read or publish) Open Access scholarly journals.
Providing Open repositories incl D-Scholarship@Pitt, PhilSci Archive, ULS Digital Collections, Historic Pittsburgh, Archive of European Integration, and more.

How we approach our support

We prioritize our support for Open Scholarship where:

Author rights are retained
The economic model is sustainable (The article processing charge model is not)
Implementation processes are efficient
Costs are reasonable
Impact is broadest