The Lafayette Library currently contributes to numerous open access publishing projects to support universal and equitable access to the scholarly record.
The Library supports the Association of Computing Machinery as it aims to transition all of its publications to open access by the end of 2025. Lafayette authors can publish their articles in ACM journals without paying any article processing charges.
The Library maintains subscriptions to some Annual Review titles so that they can be open to anyone, anywhere. In this model, Annual Reviews agrees to make some of their journals open access and eliminate all author publication fees as long as enough libraries maintain their paid subscriptions.
An agreement between the Library and CUP allows Lafayette authors to publish their articles open access in Cambridge journals without paying any article processing charges.
An agreement between the Library and the Company of Biologists allows Lafayette authors to publish their articles open access and fee-free in Journal of Cell Science, Journal of Experimental Biology, and Development, thus increasing the number of freely open articles in these subscription publications.
The Library contributes funds to support the open access publication of Cultural Anthropology, the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. This investment is part of the Lyrasis consortium’s Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP).
The Library contributed funds to support the transition of Demography, the flagship journal of the Population Association of America, from a commercial publisher to an open-access model published by Duke University Press. In 2024, the journal transitioned to a Subscribe to Open model, and the Library continues to support it financially.
DOAJ is a database providing information on peer-reviewed, open access journals, which undergo a thorough review before being accepted for inclusion. The goal of DOAJ is “to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals globally.” The Library is a contributing member of DOAJ.
Through the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), the Library supports Eastview’s Global Press Archive, which digitizes and makes openly available newspapers from around the world for scholarly research. To date, six newspaper collections have been made available to all, and two collections have been made available to all CRL member libraries.
In 2011 the Library became the first liberal arts college to join the HathiTrust as a member and has been supporting HathiTrust both financially and with Lafayette librarians’ time and expertise ever since. The goal of HathiTrust is to build a comprehensive archive of published literature from around the world, with a focus on preservation as well as access. The most visible project of HathiTrust is the HathiTrust Digital Library, which is open to all, but the group also supports research by building infrastructure and support to enable computational analysis of its corpus of works.
The Library is part of an agreement that allows Lafayette authors to publish in IOP journals on an open access basis at no cost.
Lever Press publishes peer-reviewed, open access, digitally native scholarly works. It is funded and governed by liberal arts institutions, including Lafayette Library, which was one of its founding members.
MDPI is a Swiss publisher of open access journals. Membership in the open access program provides a ten percent reduction on article processing charges and is available for any manuscript where at least one author is affiliated with Lafayette. In 2022 three Lafayette authors published articles in MDPI journals. Participation in this program is free to the Library.
The Library supports a funding model for new books published by MIT Press that make these books open access (freely available to anyone, anywhere) as long as enough libraries contribute. Through this program, about 90 books are published open access each year.
The Library is a member of Open Book Publishers, a UK publisher of peer-reviewed, open access books in the humanities and social sciences. OBP was founded in 2008 and now publishes 40 titles a year.
The Library is a member of the Open Education Network, which works to advance educational equity through open education. OEN supports the Open Textbook Library, a comprehensive resource for openly licensed academic textbooks.
A project of JSTOR, Reveal Digital uses crowdfunding to build open primary source collections from under-represented 20th-century voices of dissent. The Library contributes to the Diversity and Dissent fund, which has published collections on college student activism, prison newspapers, and HIV, AIDS, and the arts. The Library has also committed support to the “Behind the Scenes at the Civil Rights Movements” collection.
SCOAP3 is a global effort to convert journals in high energy physics to open access via the redirection of subscription funds. The Library directs the funds that it was using to subscribe to some of these physics titles to SCOAP3 so that they can now be open for all.
Working with the LYRASIS consortium, the Library contributes to this fund that supports publication of open access ebooks on topics that align with some of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
By supporting the University of Michigan Press’ Fund to Mission project, the Library helps the Press transition to publishing its books open access and meet its goal of making 75 percent of its new books open by 2023.