Open access is the practice of sharing scholarly research outputs (articles, reports, data, etc.) freely online without paywall barriers. Making Duke research open access supports the university’s mission of “knowledge in the service of society” by allowing anyone with an internet connection to access groundbreaking scholarship by Duke’s researchers. Openness expands the reach of our community’s discoveries and supports an equitable access to knowledge, enabling our students, faculty, and other researchers to read current scholarship as well as to promote the overall accessibility of scholarship in the greater publishing ecosystem.

The Duke University Libraries supports open access publishing in a number of ways, one of which is investing in open initiatives, programs, and publishing projects that allow Duke authors to publish their scholarship and freely access others’.

The following is a list of projects and open publishing venues the Libraries contribute to, which may be suitable for your publications.


Discounted/Waived Article Processing Charges (APCs) in Scholarly Journals

Some open access scholarly journals operate on a model of charging authors article processing fees upon acceptance. In order to reduce barriers to publishing in these journals, Duke Libraries has made agreements to waive or discount these fees for our authors with:

  • ACM – Association for Computing Machinery
  • Cambridge University Press
  • PLOS
  • Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)

See details of our agreements with each publisher.


Scholarly Journals

Some scholarly journal publishers and platforms are supported not by author fees and subscriptions, but by direct library investments. Duke supports these efforts in numerous journals and platforms, including SCOAP3 and the Open Library of the Humanities.

See a full list of open access scholarly journals.


Books and Scholarly Monographs

Historically, the open access movement has been journal article-focused. These projects strive to make scholarly monographs in book-based disciplines openly available. Duke University Libraries supports:

  • MIT Press Direct to Open (D2O)
  • Open Book Publishers
  • punctum books
  • University of Michigan Press Fund to Mission

See details of our agreements with book publishers.


OA Publishing Initiatives & Platforms

As the scholarly publishing ecosystem evolves, various open initiatives outside of journals and monographs have developed. These can be tools to support scholarship, collaborative efforts to reform publishing, resources beyond periodicals and books, and more. Duke supports:

  • arXiv
  • Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
  • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
  • LIBRARIA
  • PhilPapers

See details of our investments in OA publishing platforms and initiatives.


Have questions about open initiatives at Duke? Email open-access@duke.edu