Open Scholarship & Scholarly Publishing

Libra is the University of Virginia’s open access institutional repository, the online archive of scholarship created by the University's communities. It provides a central, stable location for the scholarly output (journal articles, datasets, theses/dissertations, etc.).   Anyone can search, view and download content.

Libra provides a platform to share your scholarly outputs - articles and manuscripts, books/book chapters, conference proceedings, data sets, protocols, software code, thesis or dissertation, working papers, etc. - openly across the internet.  The repository may include scholarly works prior to publication (preprint) or after publication (accepted manuscript).

Some of the benefits of depositing your work in Libra include:

• metadata and indexing, making the work widely discoverable by search engines;
• stability and preservation of the work;
• exposure and affiliation with similar works, either by subject, content type or organization;
• usage statistics;
• engagement with readers, reviewers and users.