A year in review: Open Access at OUP

This year’s International Open Access Week will take place from October 21st to 27th. On this occasion, we reflect on the progress we have made in Open Access (OA).

As the world’s largest university press for open access research and a mission-driven organization, we see “opening up” access to research as an essential part of our knowledge dissemination and are proud to have made a significant contribution to enabling greater access to academic research.

We expect to publish more than 33,000 open access journal articles and over 100 open access books in 2024, with no barriers to access or reuse. These numbers increase every year as we expand the scope and breadth of our open access publications and collaborate with authors, research funders, scientific societies and academic institutions. This year we reached an important milestone: more than 50% of the research articles in our journal program will be open access publications, with most of them published in fully open access journals.

Open up new publishing opportunities

We now publish more than 140 open access journals. In 2024, we transitioned ten journals from subscription models to OA, including the Royal Astronomical Society journals, four of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies journals, ISME Journaland other.

In addition, we continue to launch or acquire new open access journals and collaborate with leading scientific societies and academic organizations around the world. For example, we launched in 2024 BJR Artificial Intelligence on behalf of the British Institute of Radiology, NAR Molecular Medicinea new magazine in the highly successful NAR portfolio, Advances in radiology on behalf of the Radiological Society of North America and RSS Data Science and Artificial Intelligence on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society.

Our open access book publishing industry also continues to grow and diversify. In 2024 we will publish more than 100 open access books for the first time and have launched an exciting new initiative: Oxford Scholarship Online: Commit to Openingwith which we want to create three collections each with 10 open access books on the subject of publishing.

We would like to support young scientists when publishing our open access books. One of the Oblige to open collections, Support new voicesfocuses on the work of young scientists. We have also introduced a 40% discount on book processing fees for early career researchers and have further plans to support this group, which we will announce shortly.

We are also expanding into OA for different types of products. In 2025, we plan to convert the Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law to OA through our first experiment with Subscribe to Open. If enough customers decide to renew their subscription, the encyclopedias will move to OA starting in April 2025.

Transformative agreements

Our transformative Read and Publish agreements help make open access publishing available to more authors worldwide. We now have more than 60 reading and publishing agreements, covering more than 1,200 institutions around the world – including recent new agreements in Canada, Andalusia, Singapore, Lebanon and Mexico. Read and Publish agreements help expand open access publishing across topics by providing open access funding where it may not have existed in the past.

For example, in 2020, before we signed a read-and-publish agreement in the UK, only 13% of our OA publications in hybrid journals (journals offering OA and non-OA content) were in the humanities, social – and law. In 2023, the third year after the Read and Publish agreement came into force, this figure had increased to 40%.

This has a positive effect on authors who publish Open Access with us, as they receive more attention for their work.

A look at the 2023 articles shows that OA has led to more altmetrics (the way we measure the reach and impact of research) across disciplines. Specifically, OA resulted in 195% higher altmetrics in hybrid humanities journals and 197% higher altmetrics in medical journals. Open access articles published between 2018 and 2020 were also cited more across topics, particularly 73% more in life sciences and 57% more in law journals.

Speaking about our OA progress to date, Rhodri Jackson, Director of Open Access Publishing and Strategy said:

“Our commitment to OA publishing is an essential part of our mission to achieve the widest possible dissemination of trustworthy, high-quality research that meets the highest standards of publishing ethics and integrity. It is this approach that will determine our future direction and influence the way we work with authors, societies, institutions and funders to maintain the highest quality research while creating a more open world for all.”