Foreword by the Vice-Chancellor
Across the University of Oxford, we share a firm belief in the transformative, illuminating power of education and research in tackling the greatest mysteries and challenges of our time. This year has been one of unexpected turbulence, from war to natural disaster to continued political change. We are not immune to the impacts of this—which have been felt both personally and professionally by our students and colleagues—but whatever happens in the world around us, our commitment to our mission of excellence in research, scholarship, and education is unwavering.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Oxford University Press (OUP). Over the last year, I have settled into a regular cadence of meetings of the Delegates of the Press and, I have to say, it’s an appointment I look forward to as yet another way to see a unique strand of what Oxford does. The special nature of OUP’s work came to life for me as I watched King Charles III take the oath during his coronation ceremony with his hand placed on the beautiful Coronation Bible, commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and created by OUP.
Serving the research community
As both a publisher in its own right and a valued department of our University, OUP holds a vital position in being part of the community it serves. This year, it proved once again the importance of capturing and sharing different perspectives and sparking debate on the issues shaping our world through the announcement of Oxford Intersections—a new format of academic publishing that will combine original research from multiple academic disciplines to explore complex global topics beyond the scope of a single research area.
Literacy and language
OUP is an organization known globally for its commitment to the written word and remained true to form this year. In schools publishing, the team launched a series called Readerful, intended to foster a love of reading from an early age. And, as ever, the Oxford Word of the Year stole headlines across the world after a public vote and expert panel landed on ‘rizz’, derived from ‘charisma’ as a—perhaps unexpected—lens on 2023.
Citizens of the future
Across Oxford, we have made a commitment to take a leading role in the fight against climate change—something that we know must start from an early age. This year, the team at OUP rolled out a new sustainability subject area for students of the Oxford International Curriculum, inspiring young students about the change they can make to build a more sustainable world. This is mirrored in the new Little Blue Dot course for pre-primary learners of English which combines language learning with teaching young learners about how their actions can impact the world around them.
As the expansion of artificial intelligence technology begins to shape both education and research, I am looking forward to seeing what new ideas and innovation this year in publishing brings. The printing press may have been the first means by which we formally shared and disseminated knowledge, all those centuries ago, but, as technology evolves, our commitment to publishing only the highest quality in research and education does not falter.
Professor Irene Tracey
Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford
Report of the Secretary to the Delegates
In 2023/24, Oxford University Press reported a Group turnover of £833m and headline turnover growth of 2 per cent on an FRS 102 basis. This included £11m of sales which were supplied early to customers due to the transfer to a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Excluding turnover from these sales, Group turnover was £823m.
The year was one of continued progress but it also brought a number of challenges. Inflationary pressures limited spending in some of our core markets and increased our own costs, and political change and geopolitical upheaval continued to disrupt some of our business. Despite the somewhat challenging external environment, colleagues across OUP worked hard to further the fulfilment of our mission, including launching a range of new digital products and services and achieving significant operational and system improvements.
A common development for each of our publishing divisions, and for our organization as a whole, was the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly generative AI. Throughout our history we have embraced new opportunities offered by technological changes and this is another exciting evolution, but one to be approached with careful regard to the implications for research and education.
Our report on AI in education surveyed teachers globally for their perspectives. It found that respondents recognized the huge potential for AI to transform education, but that education should drive technology—not the other way around.
This is familiar ground for OUP, as the transition to digital products and services remains a critical area of focus for us. In our Academic division, revenue from digital now makes up 70 per cent of turnover and this year we made a series of improvements to our digital experience. These included a refreshed website for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the addition of 7,500 books to the Oxford Scholarship Online archive on the Oxford Academic platform.
In our English Language Teaching (ELT) division, we also continued the expansion of our digital learning support with a 300 per cent year-on-year increase in sessions recorded on Oxford English Hub, our online platform for teaching and learning English. Alongside this, we introduced Digital Flow, a new way of teaching with fully digital OUP materials, designed for screens and supporting lessons taught in person, remotely, or hybrid.
In our Education division, our core digital platforms were used by 2.5 million learners and we expanded our Oxford Smart Curriculum Service to include more core subjects. In Kenya, we launched EduZone, a pioneering all-in-one learning hub, while in Mainland China we developed a series called Talk About China with Oxford, delivered via a digital learning platform.
Curriculum reform was an opportunity for our Education and ELT divisions. In markets such as Spain and Pakistan, our teams were well placed to respond to major reforms, supporting teachers and learners in times of change. In higher education, we saw a return to growth after difficult trading conditions last year, with strong sales for e-books.
Across OUP, we won 83 prizes during 2023/24 and were shortlisted for a further 17. Prizes included the Bancroft Prize for Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant. The Essential Letters and Sounds phonics programme, with digital and print resources published by OUP, was shortlisted for a BETT (British Educational Training and Technology) Award and has been adapted for expansion into markets outside the UK.
Our surplus from trading before interest, funded projects, minority interests, and taxation (reported under the FRS 102 accounting standard) was £113 million, an increase of 12 per cent on the previous year. Our transfer to the rest of the University was £44.3m. These funds will support a range of research, scholarship, and educational activities such as the Clarendon Fund and the John Fell Fund.
I would like to thank my colleagues for their dedication and hard work in support of our success in the year. Looking ahead, we expect further change given the rate of technological advancement and social and political developments. We continue to navigate these shifts, exploring new opportunities like AI technology, but remaining committed to the needs of teachers, learners, and researchers across the world. Whatever the coming year brings, I know that the shared focus of colleagues across OUP to deliver excellence in research, scholarship, and education through our publishing will carry us forward.
Nigel Portwood
CEO of Oxford University Press and Secretary to the Delegates of the Press
2023/24 highlights
A new home for the Oxford English Dictionary
We relaunched the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online platform this year with a best-in-class user design and experience
7,500 books
We added 7,500 books, dating from 1990 to 2009, to the Oxford Scholarship Online archive on the Oxford Academic platform
100 years
We celebrated 100 years of music publishing at Oxford University Press with initiatives focused on widening participation in music-making.
Digital Flow
A new, fully digital way of teaching English language skills
10%
Users of our digital product platforms in English Language Teaching grew by 10 per cent
Readerful
A new series that aims to foster a love of reading in primary school learners
PISA
We worked with the OECD to launch the PISA 2025 Science Framework with a focus on tackling everyday challenges
AI in education
We surveyed teachers globally to understand more about their perspectives on AI technology in the classroom
Rizz
Following head-to-head battles between shortlisted words, our experts selected ‘rizz’ as Word of the Year 2023
A bible fit for a king
OUP was commissioned to produce King Charles III’s Coronation Bible
Academic
The year 2023/24 was a strong one for the Academic division. We made further progress on our digital transition, with 70 per cent of our turnover now coming from digital products and services. With a focus on the needs of the scholarly community, we increased the amount of online content available to researchers, published in new languages, and explored ways to capture the impact of research.
184 million
visitors to Oxford Academic
27,000
open access journal articles
184 countries
products are sold in
Digital progress
We launched a significant number of new digital products and made enhancements to many of our existing products. For example, we introduced a refreshed platform for the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)—OED.com—which showcases the 255,955 entries updated since its online launch in 2000. A further 17,000 senses were edited or drafted in 2023/24 alone.
To increase the availability and discoverability of our high quality research publishing, we added 7,500 books, dating from 1990 to 2009, to the Oxford Scholarship Online archive on the Oxford Academic platform, expanding the amount of available content by 30 per cent. Another notable success was the launch of Blackstone’s Professional Policing Online—a new way of bringing together relevant digital content which resulted in a 50 per cent increase in its sales and online usage.
We made a series of search and speed improvements to Oxford Academic which this year saw 184 million unique visitors from 251 different countries. Since its launch in 2017, Oxford Academic has seen 1.4 billion unique title visits.
In Higher Education, digital revenues increased by 13 per cent. Our Trove products, which provide online materials for students, expanded this year thanks to the launch of Business Trove and Science Trove, collectively making 280 undergraduate textbooks available online. Overall usage increased by 5 per cent, driven by consistent growth in our market-leading Law Trove, with more than 2.6 million unique title visits across the portfolio.
Tradition and recognition
With its first edition published in 1985, we released the 11th edition of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine, the world’s best-selling pocket medical handbook, which sold 22,500 copies at launch.
In 2023/24, we won 71 major awards. We were particularly pleased that Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg received the Bancroft Prize, while the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize went to Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant.
In another moment of recognition, and in keeping with centuries of tradition, we were commissioned to produce King Charles III’s Coronation Bible, which was used prominently during the ceremony at Westminster Abbey in May 2023. Colleagues from OUP travelled to Lambeth Palace in London to present copies of the Bible to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. In sharing the first view of it with the world’s media, the archbishop said, ‘On this momentous occasion, the Bible will be the first, and most important, gift offered to The King’.
New formats, new thinking, new services
This year saw the publication of Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe—an innovative interpretation of the history of sexuality by Sir Noel Malcolm—to widespread critical acclaim. We also added 24 new journals to our portfolio across a range of disciplines, including Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan, Art History, and Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics.
Alongside new titles, we announced the forthcoming Oxford Intersections series, an interdisciplinary research resource focused on complex global topics.
Reaching readers and researchers
We increased our global reach, selling our products in 184 countries and regions including new digital sales in Nigeria, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, and El Salvador, as well as achieving online product growth of 18 per cent in Mainland China and the surrounding region. We licensed our content into 35 languages, including Azerbaijani, Ukrainian, and Mongolian, and our dictionaries into 45 languages, adding Ukrainian, Kazakh, Slovak, and Croatian this year.
It was a strong year for journals publishing, not only in the breadth and quality of the research published, but in our market reach, with notable increases in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.
We published more than 27,000 open access journal articles in 2023, a 24 per cent increase on 2022. This was driven in part by the ongoing success of Read and Publish agreements, with agreements in additional territories including Canada, Mexico, and Kazakhstan extending the amount of open access content in our hybrid journals.
We extended our support for the scholarly research community by collaborating with digital service provider Silverchair to launch an online platform, Sensus Impact, which offers users visualized reporting on the reach of funded research.
Spotlights
100 years of music
It was a notable year for our music publishing as the department celebrated its centenary. To mark the milestone, we ran ‘Song for All’, an initiative that provided free resources to choirs worldwide, and we hosted a Christmas concert underlining our commitment to widening participation in music-making.
We also published a new volume of Carols for Choirs—a collection that showcases the best choral musicianship of our time, and now includes a broader and more diverse contributor list. We helped address the unequal representation of male and female composers in regularly-performed repertoire with the publication of The Oxford Book of Organ Music by Women Composers.
We continued to add composers to our publishing programme, including Tracy Wong, Katerina Gimon, and Matthew Lyon Hazzard, and published a German translation of choral works by John Rutter.
Refreshing the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford Languages relaunched the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) platform in July. A cornerstone research product for academic libraries, the updated OED offers additional editorial features, easier ways to discover content, and a best-in-class user design and experience. As ever, we continued to add words to the many thousands already on the site. Additions this year include chumocracy, digital age, frack, permacrisis, and ultra-processed, as well as a set of words of Japanese origin. Usage of the site increased in the year, with Google referrals up by more than 300 per cent and half of traffic coming from mobile devices.
Find out more about our academic publishing in 2023/24
English Language Teaching
Our English Language Teaching (ELT) division achieved another year of growth, thanks to strong performances in a number of regions. We extended the reach of our digital platforms, including the Oxford English Hub, and supported more learners and teachers than ever through Oxford Teacher’s Club and Oxford Reading Club.
This year saw particular success in established markets such as Turkey, the US, and, importantly, in Spain—our biggest ELT market—thanks to a major curriculum reform. We also began to explore opportunities to support learners in new areas such as home learning and guided remote teaching.
In assessment, our new Oxford Test of English (OTE) Advanced product for B2-C1 level certification was prepared for launch. It prepares students for success at university or in their careers by assessing learning in real-life contexts driven by today’s language needs, such as mediation, debating, and presentations. As we closed the financial year, we had 600 recognizing institutions for the existing levels of the Oxford Test of English.
300%
increase in sessions on Oxford English Hub
170,000
views for ELTOC sessions
10%
growth in digital platform usage
Digital products and communities
Through our continued investment in digital initiatives, we were able to enhance the experience for English language teachers and learners through the release of fully digital products and AI-powered language learning tools. We launched Digital Flow, a new way of teaching skills with OUP materials that is fully digital, providing a seamless experience for teachers and learners whether lessons are taught in person, remotely, or in a hybrid way.
The division saw a 300 per cent increase in sessions recorded on Oxford English Hub, our online platform for teaching and learning English. Overall, users of our digital product platforms grew by ten per cent in 2023/24.
Insights and ideas
We continued to support our user communities by giving them access to the latest insights and thinking on English language teaching and learning. Our English Language Teaching Online Conference (ELTOC) achieved record engagement in the teaching community, seeing over 170,000 views with downloads of the teacher’s toolkits doubling year-on-year.
In addition, we launched the Talking ELT podcast in October, which helped us to reach both new and existing audiences. The first two series focused on self-regulated learning and on the impacts of AI on English language teaching. The podcast was well received, with almost all listeners subscribing to future episodes.
As in previous years, we published several dedicated position papers on areas of interest for the ELT community, providing expert advice to English language teachers. Topics this year included multimodality, focusing on the expansion of learners’ communications skills by teaching them to express themselves through images, videos, and other multimedia, and self-regulated learning, exploring how to encourage students to take control of their own learning. We also published a paper titled Supporting Refugees, with practical advice to ensure that teachers and schools are equipped to support refugee students.
Supporting learners of all ages
This year, we launched a range of products for learners of all ages, including Little Blue Dot for pre-primary learners. It teaches very young learners how to develop language, communication, and cognitive skills through topics that demonstrate how their actions can make an impact on the world around them. We also released Harmonize for secondary learners, created a digital course for primary learners called Let’s Go with Laura, and launched customer features including onboarding tools and advanced classroom presentation tools.
For adult learners, we launched Go-Vocational, a fully digital course delivered via the Oxford English Hub. Go-Vocational features practical, real-world language relevant for the real-life scenarios students might experience in their chosen career, helping them to communicate effectively to achieve their future ambitions.
Find out more about our ELT publishing in 2023/24
Schools Publishing
In 2023/24, we worked alongside teachers, experts, schools, and partners to develop and deliver educational materials and services in 80 languages. We reached two million more learners than in the prior year—a total of 55 million in 157 countries— with educational resources that cover every learning stage: from helping a child learn to read, to success in their end of school exams, and beyond. We grew our reach and impact through curriculum reform, digital innovation, and a focus on home learning in Hong Kong, Pakistan, South Africa, and Mainland China.
55 million
learners in 157 countries
80
languages
2.5 million
learners using digital platforms
Fostering a love of reading
This year we launched new products which built upon our deep understanding of literacy, including Readerful, a series that aims to foster a love of reading in primary school learners. It provides levelled books to support independent reading and books for older, struggling readers, as well as easy-to-use teaching support. We also extended our support for readers in South Africa, adding 120 titles in four local African languages.
In Mainland China, we celebrated 45 years of publishing with our partner, The Commercial Press—a collaboration that has helped generations of Chinese students to learn English through products such as the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary and our Tree Tops primary reading resources. Thanks to this partnership, more than 32 million dictionaries and grammar guides have been sold since 2000.
Citizens of the future
We applied our experience in the evolution of science education to launch the OECD’s PISA 2025 Science Framework, which explores the need to equip young people with scientific competencies that empower them to play an active role in tackling everyday challenges. We also introduced sustainability as a subject on the Oxford International Curriculum.
In the UK, we further enhanced our capability in supporting maths fluency with the acquisition of Number Sense Maths, and the publication of the Maths Practice Journal in collaboration with White Rose Maths. We also launched the Oxford Revise series in the UK to help every learner walk into the exam hall with confidence.
The launch of OxfordAQA international qualifications in Pakistan was another significant milestone in our commitment to providing high quality, internationally recognized, and fair assessments to foster a culture of continuous improvement in education. The teaching of these qualifications aims to empower students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in a rapidly changing world.
Digital expansion
A large number of our customers are now using our digital resources all over the world; our core digital product platforms were used by 2.5 million learners in 2023/24. On our Kerboodle platform, we expanded the Oxford Smart Curriculum Service offer to include more core subjects, and brought adaptive learning to our international school customers for the first time through our International Baccalaureate Diploma Science and Cambridge IGCSE Maths products. Working with iHuman, an award winning educational provider in Mainland China, our OPERA digital assessment and reading content reached almost one million home users.
In Kenya, we launched EduZone, a pioneering all-in-one digital learning hub, providing teachers and learners with a personalized learning experience. The hub offers e-books with multimedia content, animations, and interactive activities with instant feedback and learning progress.
In response to the curriculum reform in Hong Kong, we launched a digital assessment platform as part of new blended courseware for senior secondary teachers and students. It enables teachers to adapt and assign auto-marked tests to learners, and provides diagnostic reporting and feedback to improve learning outcomes.
In Mainland China, we developed a series called Talk About China with Oxford, delivered via a digital learning platform. The series features engaging Chinese stories and aims to promote reading among primary school students across the country.
Exploring AI
We have already begun to integrate AI-enabled features into our products and services with the goal of improving learning progression. In India, our popular Oxford Advantage platform now has a Generative AI enabled chatbot called “TeachWiz” to help users with common queries, a service we plan to roll out further over the next year.
As we explored the possibilities of what AI might mean for the future of education, we published a report that shares perspectives from our community and sets out our view that education should drive technology, rather than the other way around.
Making a positive impact on young learners
Our colleagues in South Africa launched a literacy intervention project in partnership with the Department of Basic Education in the Northern Cape province. This £1.2m project, funded primarily by UNICEF, will train over 600 teachers with support materials for bilingual multi-grade teaching in Setswana and English in 123 schools with more than 20,000 learners. Its approach is evidence-based and it has been developed from our Essential Letters and Sounds resources.
Spotlight
Children’s Trade
OUP book, Marv and the Ultimate Superpower, was one of this year’s special £1 books for World Book Day. Readers were able to join Marv in five action-packed mini tales, written by Alex Falase-Koya and illustrated by Paula Bowles.
We again published our analysis of the use of language by children from the 44,000 stories submitted to this year’s BBC 500 Words competition, of which OUP is a partner. Our children’s language experts analysed the creative writing submitted to understand how children are using language in new and unusual ways to communicate; use of the word AI has surged four-fold since 2020, and usage of the word Lioness increased by over a third relative to 2020.
Find out more about our schools publishing in 2023/24
Prize highlights
Across OUP, we won 83 prizes during 2023/24 and were shortlisted for a further 17, recognizing our contribution to research and education.
Academic
In 2023/24, we won 71 major prizes for our academic publishing, and received honourable mentions or were shortlisted for a further 12 awards.
The Bancroft Prize
for Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg.
The Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
for Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant.
ASIL Certificates of Merit
Three OUP books won ASIL Certificates of Merit: Environmental Law in Arab States by Damilola S. Olawuyi, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions by Boyd van Dijk and Rebel Courts: The Administration of Justice by Armed Insurgents by René Provost
Royal Historical Society Gladstone History Book Prize
On Arid Ground: Political Ecologies of Empire in Russian Central Asia by Jennifer Keating won the Royal Historical Society Gladstone History Book Prize.
2023 Roland H. Bainton Prize for literature, Sixteenth Century Society
Authorial Personality and the Making of Renaissance Texts: The Force of Character by Douglas S. Pfeiffer won the 2023 Roland H. Bainton Prize for literature, Sixteenth Century Society (OUP Literature has won for seven consecutive years).
Modern Jewish Thought and Experience Dorot Foundation Award
The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19 by Jeremy Brown won the Modern Jewish Thought and Experience Dorot Foundation Award
English Language Teaching
In English Language Teaching, two graded readers—Merlin, The King Maker and Steve Jobs—were finalists in the Extensive Reading Foundation Language Learner Literature Awards in 2023.
Merlin, The King Maker
Steve Jobs
In Brazil, the ELT division won the TOP Educacao Award for the 7th time.
Schools Publishing
Our education division won 12 awards in 2023/24 including:
Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Awards 2023
Every Scar on the Body 《身上的每道傷疤》by champion cyclist Sarah Lee Wai-Sze won the Distinguished Publishing Award for Psychology and Self-help at Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Awards 2023 and was named Top Ten Book Picks (Secondary School Division) by HKedCity
Indie Book of the Month in the UK
for Gordon the Meanest Goose on Earth by Alex Latimer
Federation of Indian Publishers
Excellence in Book Production in two categories from the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP)
We were also shortlisted for a BETT Award for the Essential Letters and Sounds phonics programme and a BESA Evidence and Impact Award for Oxford Impact.
How we operate responsibly
Oxford University Press reaches teachers, learners, and researchers in across the globe. Our mission is to further the University of Oxford’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. In a world that is facing the growing impacts of climate change, geopolitical upheaval, and shifting social tides, we have a deep-rooted responsibility to the communities we serve.
For the third consecutive year, OUP’s Responsible Publishing Report showcases our ongoing commitment to environmental sustainability, operating ethically, and supporting the communities we work with across the world, in alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Publishers Compact.
This year we…
Supported the launch of the PISA 2025 Science Framework, working alongside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Continued our progress on the creation of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE).
Offered guidance on how best to welcome and support refugee learners into the classroom.
Reduced the use of plastic in book covers by 35 tonnes per year in India alone.
Undertook 15 modern slavery audits across three different continents.
Recruited a network of wellbeing champions to help provide colleagues worldwide with wellbeing advice and support.
Donated over 292,000 books to charitable initiatives worldwide.
Nigel Portwood, CEO
“OUP is a signatory of both Publishing Declares and the United Nations SDG Publishers Compact. I am pleased to share the following report with you, highlighting the progress that we have made towards our responsible publishing goals over the past year. Despite the challenges posed by the uncertain global context, our colleagues have successfully delivered impactful initiatives and activities that we believe will make a positive difference.”
Committees
The Delegacy, appointed from the academic staff of the University, has overall responsibility for the affairs of the Press. It meets regularly throughout the year, receives reports on the management of the Press from the Chief Executive and Finance Committee, and reviews and authorizes publications.
The Delegacy has established a Finance Committee which, under the general authority of the Delegates, directs and manages the business, assets, and finances of the Press. The Finance Committee consists of a chair elected by the Delegates, the Vice-Chancellor, the Senior Proctor, four Delegates, and four individuals possessing high qualifications in business or finance (comparable to independent non-executive directors on corporate boards), together with the Chief Executive and the Press Finance Director.
Meetings of Finance Committee and Sub-Committees
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Finances
Abstract of the Accounts of the Trading Operations and the Delegates’ Property and Reserve Fund of Oxford University Press for the year ended 31 March 2024
Annual Report Finances 2023-24
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Auditor’s Statement
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