Oxford U. Press Releases Open Access Results

-- Library Journal, 09/07/2006

Oxford University Press's Journals division has released full year figures from its optional open access program, Oxford Open, and officials say they'll give it another year. Martin Richardson, managing director of Oxford Journals, said OUP launched the program to better understand open access and, so far, the experiment has yielded some insight. "These results show that while open access is beginning to be embraced in some subject areas, the level of uptake is generally quite low," Richardson said. He said the results suggest open access is likely to be "only one of a range of models" that will support research communities.

In the first year of launch, OUP officials report, almost 400 papers have been published under the optional open access model across 36 of the 49 participating titles. The best showing was in life sciences, with approximately ten percent of authors selecting the open access option across 16 participating journals; Five percent of authors in medicine and public health selected the open access option, and three percent did so in the humanities and social sciences. Oxford Open, which launched in July 2005, gives authors the option of paying for their research to be made freely available online immediately upon publication in the participating journals. Twenty-one titles adopted this model in July 2005, and further titles have joined in 2006, with 49 journals listed now.