Publishing and Copyright

Clarke Central High School in Athens, GA, has announced a Summer Book Club for student athletes featuring The Crimson and Gold: Football and Integration in Athens, Georgia (UGA Press, 2024) by local author Mark Clegg (Economics A.B., University of Georgia). What started as a conversation in August 2025 with Assistant Head Football Coach Damien Gray and Clarke Central High librarians Angela Pendley and Naomi Craver evolved into a desire to educate students and the community about the history of integration at Clarke Central.

After saving researchers more than $2 million in 2025, UGA Libraries’ open access publishing agreements are expanding even further this year.

A newly signed read-and-publish agreement with publisher Taylor & Francis brings the list of open access publishing opportunities at UGA to more than 9,000 journal titles across 14 scholarly publishers. 

Emily Gore, deputy university librarian at the University of Georgia, has been elected to serve as the new chair of the steering committee for SPARC, an international coalition of research libraries and institutions that supports open systems for research and education.

Former Los Angeles Times Publisher and CNN President Tom Johnson will discuss his new book Driven: A Life in Public Service and Journalism from LBJ to CNN as part of the University of Georgia’s Fall 2025 Signature Lecture series on Wednesday, October 29. The public conversation with Red and Black Executive Director Charlotte Varnum will begin at 4 p.m. at the UGA Special Collections Libraries Building, with a light reception and a book signing to follow.

For UGA Libraries, Thomas May’s job centers around film and audiovisual work, but the archivist also enjoys the printed word. In fact, he was named one of the best authors in the state, as a recipient of a 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Award in the science fiction/fantasy category.

May serves as the audiovisual systems archivist and access coordinator with the Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, one of three special collections units at the University of Georgia Libraries. He’s also a novelist, who self-published his debut fantasy novel Alan Dreams of Giants in November.

University of Georgia faculty and graduate students have more than double the opportunities for open access publishing, thanks to new UGA Libraries read and publish agreements with Elsevier and Springer Nature, two of the largest academic journal publishers.

Even before three books arrived on shelves this year, UGA librarians were a part of the production. Three faculty members have been credited as author or editor in books published in 2025.

“Librarians do the essential work of acquiring, preserving, and sharing knowledge,” said university librarian Toby Graham, “but our librarians also are university faculty who contribute new scholarship, themselves, as we see from the recent publications by Ruta Abolins, Melody Rood, and Sara Wright.” 

Most recently, Abolins added a chapter to the UGA Press book The Archivability of Television: Essays on Preservation and Perseverance. Edited by Lauren Bratslavsky and Elizabeth Peterson, the book was published June 1.

The newest members of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame have broken barriers across genres — from journalism to fiction to poetry — and all three have inspired the next generation of writers through teaching and mentoring.

The 2025 class includes Tina McElroy Ansa, novelist and founder of DownSouth Press; Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer; and Tony M. Grooms, poet, novelist, and co-founder of the Georgia Writers Association. Events will be held throughout the year at the University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries in Athens to celebrate each of the honorees.

The University of Georgia is pleased to announce Feminisms, Gender, and Space, a new critical geography series that will publish cutting-edge and engaged social science on the topics of intersectional feminisms, sexuality, and gender as they relate to geographical spaces and places.