A year in review: open access at OUP

This year’s International Open Access Week runs from 21-27 October. To mark the occasion, we reflect on the open access (OA) progress that we have made.

As the world’s largest university publisher of OA research, and as a mission-driven organization, we see ‘opening up’ access to research as a vital part of how we disseminate knowledge and are proud to have made a significant contribution toward enabling greater access to academic research.

In 2024, we expect to publish more than 33,000 OA journal articles and over 100 OA books, without barriers to access or re-use. Those numbers increase each year as we increase the scale and breadth of our OA publishing, working together with authors, research funders, scholarly societies, and academic institutions. This year, we have reached a significant landmark: more than 50% of research articles across our journals programme will be published OA, with the majority of these published in fully OA journals.

Unlocking new publishing opportunities

We now publish more than 140 OA journals. In 2024, we have ‘flipped’ ten journals from subscription models to OA, including the journals of the Royal Astronomical Society, four of the journals of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies, ISME Journal, and others.

We also continue to launch or take on new OA journals, working together with leading scholarly societies and academic organizations around the world. For example, in 2024 we launched BJR Artificial Intelligence on behalf of the British Institute of Radiology, NAR Molecular Medicine, a new journal in the highly successful NAR portfolio, Radiology Advances on behalf of the Radiological Society of North America, and RSS Data Science and Artificial Intelligence on behalf of the Royal Statistical Society.

Our OA books publishing also continues to grow and diversify. In 2024 we will publish more than 100 OA books for the first time, and we have launched an exciting new initiative, Oxford Scholarship Online: Commit to Open, through which we aim to make three collections of 10 books OA on publication.

Throughout our OA books publishing we aim to support early career researchers. One of the Commit to Open collections, Support new voices, is focused on works by early career researchers. We have also introduced a 40% discount on Book Processing Charges for early career researchers, and we have further plans for supporting this group which we will announce soon.

We’re also expanding into OA for different types of products. In 2025, we aim to convert the Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law to OA through our first experiment with ‘Subscribe to Open’, where if enough customers choose to renew their subscription, the encyclopedias will become OA from April 2025.

Transformative agreements

Our transformative or ‘Read and Publish’ agreements help make OA publishing available to more authors worldwide. We now have over 60 Read and Publish agreements covering more than 1,200 institutions around the world—including recent new agreements in Canada, Andalucia, Singapore, Lebanon, and Mexico. Read and Publish agreements help expand OA publishing across subjects, by providing funding for OA where that 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 publishing in hybrid journals (journals offering OA and non-OA content) was in humanities, social sciences, and law. In 2023, the third year with the Read and Publish agreement in place, that figure had risen to 40%.

This has a positive impact for authors publishing OA with us, as they can get more attention for their work.

Looking at 2023 articles, OA led to increased Altmetrics (the way we measure reach and impact of research) across disciplines. In particular, OA led to 195% higher Altmetrics in hybrid humanities journals, and 197% Altmetrics in medical journals. OA articles published from 2018-2020 have also been cited more across subjects, most notably 73% more in life sciences and 57% more in law journals.

Speaking about our OA progress so far, Rhodri Jackson, Director, Open Access Publishing and Strategy, said:

“Our commitment to OA publishing is a key part of how we deliver on our mission to achieve the widest possible dissemination of trusted, high-quality research which upholds the highest standards of publication ethics and integrity. It is this approach that steers our future direction and influences the way we work with authors, societies, institutions, and funders to maintain the highest quality research while creating a more open world for everyone.”