Please note that some library services (Ask Us, Get It, ILL, EZBorrow) will not be available during the upcoming winter recess dates of December 18 - January 2

Our Commitment to Open Scholarship

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:

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