Virginia Tech Publishing & Press
2026 Library Publishing Showcase Week: Innovating and Adapting
Virginia Tech Publishing & Press
Virginia Tech Publishing (VTP) launched in 2017 as Virginia Tech’s digital-first open access library publisher building off of work to publish open access journals and ETDs in the university libraries dating back to the 1990s. Since 2017, VTP has published over 60 books and OER, supported 14 journals, and has partnered on over 20 digital scholarship and multimedia projects. In 2025, VTP expanded to include the launch of Virginia Tech Press, to become Virginia Tech’s first university press.
Describe the impact of your resource?
Annually, we track the number of publications and projects, authors and editors, and workshops and events. Long term, per project, we track the number of downloads of each format from both our website and institutional repository as well as the number of print on demand copies purchased. We are expanding to track the number of proposals received, regardless of whether or not we are able to take them on.
What makes this program so special?
This is a huge step for our program, giving us more space to focus on sharing open access scholarship in multiple formats and increasing the number of publications we create each year, while allowing us to open up to authors beyond VT. But for me what’s made this step special, is the team we’ve built and the unique experiences everyone has brought that has allowed us to push our own boundaries as we’ve gone through the strategic planning process, refined our editorial workflows, and explored new ways to serve our community while remaining committed to our core values of openness, transparency, innovation, and collaboration.
Why library publishing?
We are able to remain 100% open access because we are in the library and funded by the library. This allows us to work within the existing infrastructure from the more logistical, but extremely important, items like IT, HR, and finance to emerging partnerships that allow space for experimentation with innovative digital scholarship. Being a library publishing program and being fully embedded within the library creates natural collaborations with our colleagues in areas like preservation, metadata, data services, and so on. We’ve also had amazing support from our Dean, Tyler Walters, and Associate Dean, Patrick Tomlin, that have made this all possible.
What would you say to a prospective author or editor looking to work with your program?
We strive to create a collaborative experience, working closely with authors, editors, and researchers as they move through the publication process. This collaborative model allows us to try new things, whether that may be a new tool or platform, final publication format, or an alternative peer review model. Ultimately, our goal is to help communicate research and educational resources to a broader audience, so taking the needs of each project and project lead into consideration throughout the publication process.