Oxford University Press (OUP) is pleased to announce that from 1 April 2013 our journals will be compliant with the Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Wellcome Trust policies on open access (OA). OUP is mission-driven to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. We embrace both ‘gold’ and ‘green’ open access publishing to support this mission. We are committed to working with our society partners to support sustainable OA for each community, and have consulted with each of our partners to decide on the best route to compliance for each journal.
OUP’s open access programme, Oxford Open, dates back to 2004. We publish 13 fully open access titles, and over 120 ‘hybrid’ titles. In total through these two channels we published over 3,200 open access papers in 2012. With the new funding policies in place, we want to ensure we meet the needs of our authors and will be extending open access options to virtually all our journals.
Mandy Hill, Publishing Director, Global Academic Business, OUP, said: ‘OUP has a long and proud history of open access publishing. We were one of the first publishers to transition a major subscription journal to open access. In addition the uptake of our hybrid option has largely been higher than industry trends.’
The RCUK’s policy on open access requires authors to comply either by publishing ‘gold’ OA using a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY), or by ‘green’ OA after embargo periods specified by the RCUK and laid out in the Publishers’ Association flow chart below. Authors will be able to comply via both routes with OUP:
-‘Gold’ open access – the vast majority of our titles will offer authors the option of making their paper immediately available by payment of an APC (Article Processing Charge). Authors will be able to choose between various Creative Commons licences, including CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, and CC-BY-NC-ND. The exact choice of licences will be dependent on individual journal policy.
-‘Green’ open access – the embargo periods for OUP journals will largely comply with the RCUK/Wellcome policies, as laid out in the RCUK and Government endorsed flow chart.
Mandy Hill further commented: ‘We look forward to continuing to help authors comply with their funders’ mandates, particularly in what promises to be a time of change. We will also continue to work with the RCUK and other funders to report back on the outcomes of the new policies.’
