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The scholarly publishing process is a detailed and iterative one, with many crucial steps throughout its lifecycle: from research, writing, and peer review; to editing, design, and production; to dissemination, discovery, and preservation.
At Virginia Tech Publishing (VTP) we assist the VT community—including faculty, staff, students, and community members—with any and all steps of the publishing process.
We offer services tailored to a variety of formats, including:
Our subject scope reflects the strengths of Virginia Tech, including arts and humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields.
As a member of the Library Publishing Coalition, we share their vision of a scholarly publishing landscape that is open, inclusive, and sustainable. All our publications are free to download or read online. We also strive to make everything we publish accessible to people with disabilities.
We do not generally charge for our services, but in instances where this is not possible, we will be open about our costs and, if appropriate, seek partnerships/funding on campus or beyond.
As a digital-first publisher, we do not hold physical inventory—if a print edition is requested, we offer it through a third party (e.g. Amazon). To keep these texts affordable, we do not collect any of the sales revenue.
We encourage authors/editors/creators to have at least one consultation with VTP staff prior to submitting a proposal. For most publications, we accept proposals year round.
When a proposal is submitted, the VTP Team assesses:
Our journals program covers subjects from across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields, and several are edited by Virginia Tech undergraduate and graduate students. We are open to adding journals in new subject areas that reflect emerging strengths of the university.
Virginia Tech Publishing is committed to following the editorial practices detailed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) as set forth in the COPE guidelines.
Please contact us if you wish to create a new open access journal or transition an existing journal from subscription-based to open access.
For any questions regarding journals, contact Jason Higgins: jasonhiggins@vt.edu.
The Virginia Tech Libraries published its first open textbook in 2016. Today the Open Education Initiative supports Virginia Tech faculty who are interested in authoring or adapting non-traditional, open educational resources and new forms of digital scholarship as alternatives to traditional textbooks and homework software access codes. Faculty are invited to apply for competitive grants of up to $3,000.
The Open Education Initiative (OEI) is a program of the Scholarly Communication department of the University Libraries. Funded and operated separately, the OEI supports development, adaptation, and adoption of open educational resources. The OEI maintains a collaborative working relationship with Virginia Tech Publishing, relying on VTP for copyediting coordination and use of the VTP Imprint for qualified publications.
Additional literature on open educational resources and example projects are available in the Open Education Libguide. For complete information on the Open Education Initiative Grants, please download the Grants Information document. To apply visit the online application. For more information about support for open textbooks contact Anita Walz: arwalz@vt.edu.
We publish a variety of long-form works by the Virginia Tech community. These include single-author books, edited volumes, reports, and white papers. We partner with academic departments, centers, and institutes to publish individual works or ongoing series.
For more information, contact Emily Hills (emilyhills@vt.edu) or Iliana Cosme-Brooks (ilianacb@vt.edu).
We have been expanding our capacity to support members of the Virginia Tech community who use digital tools and platforms (e.g. Omeka, WordPress, PressBooks) in their scholarship and pedagogy. We offer classes as well as one-on-one training, and in 2021 we launched a pilot project with Reclaim Hosting (VT Domains) to offer web hosting on a limited basis to students for use as “sandboxes” in Virginia Tech courses.
From these partnerships come projects that are collaborative, largely web based, often interactive, always born-digital, and often manifest as digital arts and humanities projects. Examples include online, peer-reviewed scholarship, podcasts, digital exhibits, and video shorts that stand alone or support existing, more traditional VTP partnerships and publications.
For more information on VT Domains and digital scholarship contact Corinne Guimont (gcorinne@vt.edu) and for more on podcasts and other media production services contact Joe Forte (joeforte@vt.edu).
Established in 2017 in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (CLAHS), Athenaeum is a suite of rooms on the first floor of Newman Library dedicated to cultivating and supporting Digital Humanities (DH) teaching, learning, research, and publication at Virginia Tech.
Athenaeum is a place where faculty and students from CLAHS can collaborate with librarians and technology specialists to plan classes, activities, and events devoted, in one way or another, to DH topics.
In all Athenaeum activities we work with our partners to strike a balance between hands-on, experiential enterprises such as developing podcasts or mixed-media web publications and more traditional scholarly activities such as seminars and speaker series featuring DH scholars of local, regional, national, and international renown.
The Athenaeum suite is flexible, dynamic, and ever-evolving in its capabilities and the breadth of its purview. If you wish to tour the suite or consult with Joe Forte, the Athenaeum Coordinator and Digital Humanities Specialist, you may contact him at: joeforte@vt.edu.
Beyond producing multimodal open scholarship, Virginia Tech Publishing also provides the campus community with holistic support and opportunities related to publishing.