OUP opens up author choice

Oxford Journals, the journal publishing arm of Oxford University Press (OUP), is embracing open access (OA) publishing with the launch of Oxford Open, an author pays publishing model for 21 of its journals.

From July, authors will be given the choice of paying £1,500 and publishing their articles online immediately under the Oxford Open scheme, or remaining with the traditional publishing process.

Journals involved in the scheme include: Human Molecular Genetics, Journal of Economic Geography, Health Promotion International, Journal of Refugee Studies, Bioinformatics and European Sociological Review.

Martin Richardson, managing director of OUP's Oxford Journals division, said: "Oxford Open is a logical extension to our current open access experiments, and will allow us to collect valuable first-hand data on the demand for OA by authors."

Charges will be discounted for institutions which subscribe to the titles that authors are submitting to. OUP will revise the subscription costs of the titles in 2007.

Open Access champion Jan Velterop backed the OUP initiative, telling IWR that he believes Oxford Open is the most convincing OA adoption from a traditional publisher yet, because authors retain copyright.

"The choice OUP is offering authors is meaningful. Funding bodies insist on the author retaining the copyright," he said.

Springer, the first traditional publisher to offer an author pays model with its Springer Open Choice launched in July 2004, insists that authors sign over their copyright. Velterop believes Springer Open Choice is inhibitive of true open access publishing, because of its copyright demands, and the high level of fees it charges. OUP's £1,500 fee is acceptable to funding bodies, he said.

OUP has also amended its post-print policy in accordance with the Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), publishers of PubMed Central in the US. If authors with funding from NIH are published in OUP journals, they can now place their findings onto PubMed Central within one year of publication by OUP.

A spokesperson for OUP said adopting this policy preserved OUP subscription revenues, and delivered open access.

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