Open Partnerships and Services

UTA Libraries’ Open Partnerships and Services (OPS) department creates partnerships and seeks opportunities to increase access to faculty, student, and staff intellectual and creative outputs through open access projects. We support, implement, and sustain:

  • digital scholarly publishing (in all formats with an emphasis on open access)
  • digital scholarship (e.g., digital humanities and open science),
  • data visualization (as it relates to open scholarship),
  • open data and open-source software
  • author/creator copyright retention and the use of Creative Commons licenses

OPS is dedicated to the ideal that both authors and readers should have open and equitable access to information and publication opportunities. We ensure public access and preservation of UTA’s scholarly contributions in our institutional repository.

By the numbers

  • OPS advocates for open access scholarship! Did you know that open access articles by UTA authors have DOUBLE the number of citations on average (8.61 versus 4.82 citation rate) than those behind paywalls in pay-to-read journals!
  • UTA ResearchCommons openly shares almost 30,000 scholarly, curricular, and professional resources! Several have over 10,000 annual views!
  • Over the last year, UTA ResearchCommons resources have been viewed 1,237,329 times and searched 1,573,151 times!
  • Since 2007, we have openly published over 6000 theses and dissertations produced by UTA graduate students, greatly contributing to the cutting-edge scholarly record!
  • OPS publishes and supports 7 active open access journals through Mavs Open Press! Readership of several journals is in the 10,000s!
  • 16 articles published in 2022 by UTA authors were in the top 1% highest cited in their field. 10 of those 16 are published open access!

OPS Goals

  • Increase open access scholarly outcomes at UTA
  • Advocate for open access, author’s rights, and awareness of copyright/intellectual property
  • Build and maintain expert collaborations with researchers and learners through excellent service
  • Partner across Libraries’ departments to increase staff competencies about OPS opportunities, procedures, and outcomes, ensuring awareness and consistency

Open Awards

OPS is proud to offer the OPEN AWARDS annually to recognize authors of the most viewed publications in the institutional repository, editors of our open access journals, partners who developed the most visited digital exhibits, and student publishing for the first time! We offer monetary awards and recognition to show our appreciation of the choice to publish/share work openly!