Open Access Publishing

We support faculty, students, and staff in all aspects of open access publishing, open education, open scholarship, and advocacy. See the Open Access Quick Guide for information on the different levels of open access.

Mavs Open Press lowers barriers to publishing by offering no-cost services for scholars, educational professionals, and students from diverse backgrounds by supporting the publication of Open Educational Resources and Open Access Journals and Books.

We offer publishing services for new and remixed OER authored by UTA faculty and students. OER from our collection are hosted on Pressbooks and made available to readers  in various digital formats free of charge. Services provided include:

• Access to easy-to-use tools including Pressbooks, H5P, and Hypothes.is, as well as training and technical support
• Consulting on copyright questions
• Obtaining an ISBN
• Providing multiple access options, including web-based, PDF, EPUB, and print
• Maximizing discoverability of your book through robust metadata and indexing
• Preserving and archiving the digital content in perpetuity

Pressbooks publications allow embedded multimedia, interactive activities and assessment with automatic feedback, and optional grade integration with Canvas. To begin using Pressbooks, request a user account and contact the OER Department at library-open@listserv.uta.edu. 

We offer no-cost services for scholars who wish to publish a new open-access journal or convert an existing print journal. We can also help you publish your book in open access, digital format, whether it's a scholarly monograph discussing high-level research or a less formal work that focuses on teaching practice or other topics. We publish on a variety of topics and ensure all content is offered open access with Creative Commons licenses, so that authors retain their rights and users/readers know expectations of use. 

Journal publishing services include:

• Obtaining an ISSN or ISBN and permanent identifiers (DOIs)
• Assisting with all aspects of technical setup and production, including in some cases layout and copyediting (when funding is available)
• Ensuring all publications are as accessible as possible for all readers
• Providing a publishing platform that simplifies and automates the peer-review process and includes options for blind or double-blind review
• Hosting open access digital content on a secure server with frequent backups and built-in redundancies
• Consulting on copyright, Creative Commons, and intellectual property questions
• Maximizing discoverability of your publication through search-engine optimization and robust metadata
• Preserving and archiving publication content in perpetuity

Here are some questions to think about as you assess how prepared you may be to start a new journal or transfer an existing one:

• Do you want a peer-reviewed journal or editor-reviewed?
• Do you have staff to serve as journal managers, reviewers, copyeditors, and layout editors? See Best Practices in Peer Review Handbook.
• If you are moving from subscription-based print to digital format, do you have a plan for communicating this to your subscribers?
• If you’re new to journal publishing, you’ll need to allow extra time to become familiar with managing the review process.

Contact library-open@listserv.uta.edu to discuss the open access journal opportunities with Mavs Open Press.

MavMatrix is UTA’s institutional repository and archival hub. It is the new home for over 12,000 open access works by UTA researchers and over 120,000 digitized archival materials from Special Collections.

ENTER THE MAVMATRIX!

MavMatrix preserves and showcases UTA's legacy and research/creative record in a robust and reliable digital environment, housing a wide variety of historic and recent resources available globally.

• Contact library-open@listserv.uta.edu for inquiries about scholarly resources, accessibility, or technical concerns.
• Contact spcoref@uta.edu for inquiries about archival resources.

Authors retain their copyright, provide UTA with a non-exclusive distribution license, and choose a Creative Commons license, thereby retaining control of their work to share/publish it elsewhere. All archival materials are provided with a Creative Commons license as well. Advantages to sharing your work include:

• A higher likelihood of being cited because of increased visibility in search engines and other harvesters.
• Fulfills requirements of federal funders, such as the NIH, NSF, & NASA.
• Provides free access since your works are not hidden behind a paywall, copyright retention, and immediate access to your research without waiting several years for an article to be published.
• Host self-created content for your courses or your colleagues, including digital exhibits.
• Supports and promotes the open access scholarship movement to ensure public/global awareness and benefit from research.

Authors wishing to submit should use the "Submit Your Work" links on MavMatrix. Staff will check the copyright status of previously published materials, review submissions for metadata standards, and ensure your work is in the most relevant section.

MavMatrix is the home to digitized materials from Special Collections. You can access and download photographs, letters, maps, newspapers, and more from the site, including digitized images from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collection. Organized by Special Collection’s collecting areas, users are free to browse related collections and expand their understanding of the history of Texas and cartography.

Digital scholarship refers to scholarship that uses digital tools to find evidence, conduct queries, and do research. This term is also used to describe scholarship that is published and/or preserved using new technologies. Digital projects are research-informed initiatives to make media or information available via digital means. These projects may be focused on narrative (curated digital exhibit), geographic location (GIS map), chronological analysis (timeline), etc.

Digital Humanities is a discipline at the intersection of computing technologies and humanities modes of analysis. It encompasses a wide variety of methodologies and tools. We're dedicated to collaborating on and supporting scholarly research around digital humanities. Contact library-open@listserv.uta.edu for consultations for your research and for class instruction for your students.

If you have a Digital Humanities or other digital projects in mind and want to know if we can be a partner, send us the details through library-open@listserv.uta.edu.

We’ve collaborated for many years on digital humanities projects and scholarship, incorporating materials from our Special Collections as well as materials sources by faculty and students. Many of these projects have become Digital Collections. If you’re interested in using our digital collections in your scholarship, contact library-open@listserv.uta.edu.

Congrats on working towards your thesis or dissertation at UTA! The UTA Libraries Digital Publishing Librarian, Digital Publishing Specialist, and entire OER & Digital Services team are here to help you submit your documents, so they become part of the publicly accessible scholarly record. This important practice is part of the growing movement for open access scholarship around the world to ensure that EVERYONE has access to the results of scholarly research.

Thesis and dissertation process and deadlines

Traditionally, university libraries subscribe to journals with a subscription fee to the journal publisher so that university researchers and students can access journal content that would otherwise be behind a paywall. Open Access (OA) publishing allows anyone to access and re-use the journal content subject to license agreements at no cost. To make an article OA, authors usually need to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to the publisher. As part of UT System, UTA has been part of several so-called “Transformative Agreements” for open access publishing, wherein funds used for subscription are partially allocated for paying the APC on behalf of authors of the university. More recently, there are different solutions moving away from the Transformative Agreement model. UTA is participating in several such pilot programs to help move the needle towards more equitable open access scholarly publishing.

Current Open Access Agreements

The UTA CARES Grant Program supports educators interested in practicing open education through the adoption of OER or when no suitable open resource is available, the creation of new OER or the adoption of library-licensed or other free content. Additionally, the program promotes innovation in teaching and learning through the exploration of open educational practices, such as collaborating with students to produce educational content of value to a wider community. Applications for grant funding are accepted twice a year. Grant categories include affordable adoption stipends, OER Modification Grants, and OER Creation Grants.

Apply to UTA CARES

We provide travel support for UTA educators to enable participation in local, regional, and national OER conferences and events.

Faculty who attend an Open Textbook Workshop session will be eligible to earn a $150 stipend for submitting a review of an open textbook. More information about these stipends and the Open Textbook Workshops can be found on the Workshops page.

The Open Initiatives Grant program was first launched in 2022 as a pilot to expand UTA Libraries’ support of open projects for teaching and learning, as well as open access publishing. Our OI Grant considers applications for any project that will yield an openly licensed outcome. View a List of Past Awardees.

There are two types of OI Grants:

Teaching & Learning OI Grants focused on supporting curricular and extracurricular outcomes for UTA students and our partners. Successful applicants to this type of grant will demonstrate that their project aligns with the UTA Libraries' strategic goals and will result in open access outcome(s) available to the public. Contact LIBRARY-OI-GRANT@LISTSERV.UTA.EDU with inquires and questions prior to submission. 

Apply for a Teaching & Learning OI Grant

Article Processing Charges (APC) OI Grants support the costs of publishing open access with commercial publishers. Before you submit to this grant program, please check if your publication falls under one of our existing open access agreements. Refer to the application link below for full details about eligibility and requirements of the grant. Please note that projects with federal funding or high-existing funding will not be considered. Please ensure that publishing costs are included in your grant budgets ahead of time. Contact library-open@listserv.uta.edu with inquires and questions prior to submission. 

Applications for APC funding are closed for 2024-25

UTA Libraries administration will continue to assess the impact of this grant program to determine its continuance and where we can partner with others on campus to expand support for open access research publishing and open educational activity. Please reach out to the Open Initiatives Grant committee at LIBRARY-OI-GRANT@LISTSERV.UTA.EDU with feedback about those pilot program. 

For other grant opportunities, check out the Teaching and Learning Funding Opportunities.

Open @ UTA Libraries Blog

OER & Digital Scholarship Staff