Virginia Tech’s Rights Reversion Service
2026 Library Publishing Showcase Week: Cultivating the Commons
The Open Education Initiative (OEI) is a project of the Scholarly Communication Department of the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. Rights Reversion services provided by the OEI have resulted in re-publication of four book-length works as open educational resources (OER), some but not all of which were out of print.
Works deemed less-than-profitable to many publishers may still have tremendous value to students and instructors when their content has utility for teaching and learning. These are the types of works we hope to bring back into print, while “opening” up their content with an open license.
Extending impact of existing resources
Since 2016, the University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Office and Open Education Initiative (OEI) have conducted outreach to faculty through a variety of channels. In response to faculty requests, we have worked to enable access to out-of-print works back in print and released under open licenses
Instructors, authors, and estates been delighted to see the works available again. Learners around the world benefit the most from perpetual, free access to works deemed important by subject matter experts. Together, these republished titles have hundreds of thousands of downloads and are used in courses beyond our institution. These works include: Veterinary Epidemiology, Radio Systems Engineering, Revised 1st edition, Construction Contracting, 2nd edition, and Methods of Teaching Agriculture, 3rd edition.
Opportunities for this work within a library
Library-situated programs are ideally situated for the formation of collaborative, learning-centric partnerships with instructional faculty. If one were situated outside of a library, it would be much more difficult to identify areas for high-impact value-added services. Further, rights reversion work relies on existing relationships of trust and access to university resources: legal counsel, digitization services, creative and talented production staff, and user-friendly tools such as Pressbooks. Working together toward the common goal of a rights reversion makes projects like these possible.
The support the OEI offers and methods of supporting this work have evolved over time, including updating CC licensing requirements to allow derivatives, negotiating with estates, and publishers, and using novel partial-rights-reversions with publishers who retain some rights. Workflows for re-production of rights-reverted works have also evolved from scan-and-OCR to layout and design via Pressbooks, matching the standard OER production workflow and enabling production of multiple formats and files ready for print on demand.
Advice for library publishers considering rights-reversion support
Rights reversion projects are among the most rewarding of projects. Publications are already classroom-tested and selected for use. Instructors have known-course material that fits. Students have much-improved and zero-cost access to course materials. And, authors and author-estates are thrilled to have their works or works of their loved ones back in print. Such projects are also well-aligned with institutional goals for student retention, completion, and success. Rights reversion projects are a win for libraries, educational institutions, instructors, and readers alike.
Rights reversion projects still have costs, which makes having a strong case for such projects important. Instructors using out-of-print works are among the best-positioned advocates for a rights reversion to OER project. These instructors will likely be asked to justify the potential impact vs. the publishing effort involved. They may even get involved in contacting authors if they have an existing collegial relationship.
Library publishers involved in overseeing such projects may be happy to know that libraries have leverage with some publishers because of existing business relationships, sometimes making (all or partial) rights-reversion negotiations move more quickly. Instructors with collegial relationships with authors are also valuable.
I hope that many library publishers will see the value in this work and decide to support it. I also hope that instructors will ask for this type of service.