The University of Virginia’s scholarly repository, Libra, is expanding! Now there’s LibraOpen, the newest addition to Libra’s suite of open access services, offering more options for getting your scholarship out to the public. LibraOpen now accepts a broad range of deposit types in addition to articles and traditional research. For instance, depositing a poster from a conference, or a video of a presentation, whether at UVA or another institution, creates a Digital Object Identifier (DOI)—a persistent URL that you can immediately share and cite. It will go live in Virgo within 24 hours, and be available via search engine to educators, scholars, and the public around the world.

LibraOpen also offers ORCID iDs—unique identifiers that distinguish you from other researchers, even if they have the same name, ensuring that anyone finding your scholarly contributions online will know you are the source. Additionally, LibraOpen allows you to create entries with embedded links to Open Access content stored in other repositories. This means you can keep the “master” copy in a discipline-based repository (like arXiv or MLA Commons), create an entry in LibraOpen featuring that link, and thus increase its exposure through tools like Google Scholar and Virgo!

If you’ve placed work into Libra in the past, don’t worry! Older URLs remain functional, and we’re migrating your work to our newest platform!

You still determine who can see the work you put into LibraOpen:

• A Public Deposit License makes the description and full contents of your submission available worldwide, and you retain the right to submit your work to publishers and other repositories.
• A UVA-only Deposit License makes the description of your work available worldwide, but the full content to users of UVA Libraries only.

LibraOpen is just one of many options for sharing open scholarly output. Contact your library liaison for a consultation about scholarly repositories and open publishing options in your discipline.