About OA at Emory

Emory University faculty passed the Emory Open Access Policy in 2011; shortly thereafter, the Scholarly Communications Office began sharing faculty scholarship in OpenEmory, which preserves works by Emory researchers and makes them freely accessible. Supporters of OA scholarship across Emory include the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI), the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence (CFDE), the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS), and Emory Libraries.

Bill & Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry

Author's Reception 2019, featuring Dr. Deboleena Roy speaking with microphone and others onlooking in the background. Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Digital Publishing in the Humanities initiative at the Fox Center aims both to educate the Emory community about the emerging publication options in humanities scholarship, and to offer subventions that support the publication of digital/open access monographs by Emory faculty as they navigate the shifting terrain of academic publication. Through programs like TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosytem), the initiative builds an infrastructure that supports humanities faculty at a time of technological innovation and changes in the economic model of academic publishing.

Center for Faculty Development and Excellence

Photo of three people smiling and holding books in the Woodruff Library Jones Room, Emory University.CFDE supports Emory faculty authors, including those who wish to publish their works open access. CFDE works with Emory faculty through initiatives like the Public Scholarship Advancement (PSA) fund, a grant program designed to help faculty advance public scholarship-related activities, and the Scholarly Writing and Publishing (SWAP) fund, a grant program designed to help faculty seeking professional editorial support for projects in development across a range of serious scholarly works, including book manuscripts, article manuscripts, grantwriting, and digital scholarship.

Emory Center for Digital Scholarship

Gathering of people at Post45 launch party at Emory University, featuring a projection screen with Post45 homepage, in the ECDS (third floor Woodruff Library), Emory University.ECDS develops innovative digital approaches to traditional publishing genres such as books, journals, and scholarly editions, and works with scholars to create new forms of digital publishing such as thematic research collections, interactive narratives, and virtual archives. ECDS also hosts a number of open access journals and develops publishing platforms, including OpenTour Builder (a walking tour application) and Readux (a collaborative group annotation software).

The ECDS research and training center, developed in partnership with the Laney Graduate School, provides students with project and process management experience and digital publishing skills that enhance their professional portfolios.

Emory Libraries

Open Access Publishing Fund

Emory University’s Open Access Publishing Fund supports Emory authors in publishing in open access (OA) journals and books when no alternative funding is available. The goal of the fund is to foster the exploration of new and innovative publishing models across research communities.

Digital Collections

Screenshot of Langmuir photograph collection page featuring an African American nurse with an infant. Photo also features cursive text: Miss Payne- ready to go for a ride with her nurse Mary-Lizzie [indecipherable word] 1909 Washington D.C.; below photography is metadata/information about the item.The Emory Libraries launched Emory Digital Collections in April 2020. This resource delivers long-term digital access to unique cultural heritage and scholarship collections from Emory. The site currently provides direct access to digitized content from multiple campus libraries, with many of the materials open to the public. Although many items are still protected by copyright, some are in the public domain (i.e., free from copyright and available for reuse). New digital content is being added weekly, and as part of an ongoing Emory Libraries strategic initiative, the Libraries will expand this resource to include material submitted by campus scholars and researchers for long-term preservation.

In addition to Emory Digital Collections, the Libraries continue to manage two scholarly repositories:

  • OpenEmory contains mostly scholarly journal articles by Emory researchers published elsewhere, but it also has original scholarly works such as conference posters, papers, and presentations.
  • Emory Theses and Dissertations contains culminating works by graduate students and Honors Program undergraduate students since 2007 (works previous to that time are in print-only in our collections and can be found in our catalog).

External OA Initiatives

Emory Libraries recently revised and updated its Open Access Collection Development Policy (PDF), which serves to guide decision making about which open access initiatives to support with Libraries funding or other types of contributions. Learn more about our investments in open access and about our agreements with publishers allowing APC-free open access publishing.