Experimentation, sustainability, and equity: reflecting on 20 years of open access publishing

13 May 2025
4 min read
Director – Open Access Publishing and Strategy

Rhodri Jackson

“It’s an exciting time for open access publishing. Across the research environment, there is constant innovation, disruption, and evolution—changed ideas, transformed business models, radical policies.”

2025 marks 20 years since we, at OUP, launched our open access (OA) publishing by ‘flipping’ Nucleic Acids Research, one of our biggest journals, from subscription to open access. In the same year, we also started converting other journals to ‘hybrid’ open access (where some articles are published open access and some are not).

Since then, our commitment to open access has remained constant, and we have continually expanded our OA offering. The anniversary gives us a good opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve made, and think about the exciting initiatives we have ahead of us.

In our journals publishing, we have come a long way from the handful of OA journals we published back in the early 2000s. Open access publishing and research has grown significantly around the world over the last twenty years, as research funders, governments, publishers, and academic institutions have pushed for a more open research environment.

OUP has been a part of this change. We now publish more than 150 fully OA journals, based all around the world and covering a wide range of disciplines. In recent years, we’ve launched the Oxford Open series, a collection of high-quality journals covering critical areas such as climate change, energy, economics, materials science, and digital health. More recently, we have been working with a selection of our affiliated societies, associations, and journals to launch Research Connections, a new journal covering all areas of medicine and healthcare.

We’ve also agreed ‘transformative’ or ‘read and publish’ agreements with customers around the world, including new agreements in 2025 in California, Colombia, and Hong Kong. These agreements enable researchers at participating institutions to both read our journals and publish open access. Read and publish agreements have been a huge contributor to the growth of our OA publishing, to the extent that in 2024 we became a majority OA publisher—more than half of our articles across our entire journals portfolio were published OA.

While our journals programme has been steadily moving towards OA for decades, the progression has been less rapid for monographs. There are good reasons for this—monographs are very different to journals articles in all sorts of ways, including content development, sales life, and funding. Having said that, as a major publisher of monographs, we want to make sure we are experimenting with lots of options for OA, and over the last year have launched three new models:

  • Commit to Open: customers can support making collections of monographs OA. This pilot, which includes a collection of monographs written by Early Career Researchers (ECRs), runs until 31 July 2025, and we’re looking forward to seeing how many books we can make OA via the programme.
  • Subscribe to Open: in this model, we commit to making a product open access if enough customers continue to subscribe. Through Subscribe to Open, we have now made the Max Planck Encyclopedias of Public International Law open access until at least April 2026. We’ve been able to do this because of our customers supported the move, and we hope that will continue to be the case in the years to come.
  • Early Career Researcher First Book Prize: a new annual prize where the winning books will be published open access without charge, giving a great opportunity for ECRs to have their first book publish OA, with all the intrinsic benefits that brings in terms of visibility and readership.

Supporting ECRs is a key theme of several of our OA books initiatives. We also offer a 40% discount on our open access charges for books for ECRs, and continue to look for ways to ensure we can unlock opportunity for ECRs to publish OA.

Equity is also critical to our journals publishing, where we offer waivers on open access publishing for authors in over 100 countries, and discretionary waivers for authors outside these countries. All of this is fundamental to our goal to ensure our OA publishing is equitable and available to all.

So, what’s next?

It’s an exciting time for open access publishing. Across the research environment, there is constant innovation, disruption, and evolution—changed ideas, transformed business models, radical policies. Over the next few years, we’re looking forward to continuing to expand and adapt—whether through new journals, new initiatives, new agreements, or other ideas.

We’re relishing the challenge of OA publishing and its ever-changing nature—no year, month, or day is the same. 20 years on, that continues to be the case.

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