Demand for open access 'low'

A year-long experiment in open access publishing by the Oxford University Press has concluded that the level of uptake for an author-pays system remains "generally quite low", and that the new model is not sufficient on its own to support the requirements of different research communities.

Full year figures released by Oxford Journals , a division of Oxford University Press, from its optional open access experiment, Oxford Open, show that in the first year of launch, almost 400 papers have been published under the optional open access model across 36 of the 49 participating titles. But managing director Martin Richardson said that this figure was still marginal: “These results show that while open access is beginning to be embraced in some subject areas, the level of uptake is generally quite low. These results continue to suggest that open access is likely to be only one of a range of models that will be necessary to support the requirements of different research communities."

The majority of uptake of optional open access has been in the life sciences, with approximately 10% of authors selecting the open access option across 16 participating journals in this area, compared with approximately 5% in medicine and public health, and 3% in the humanities and social sciences. Three life sciences titles in the areas of molecular and computational biology have seen over 20% uptake. The highest of these was for Bioinformatics , which has published over 50 open access papers in 2006. 2007 online subscription prices have been adjusted for these journals to reflect this uptake. Claire Bird, senior editor, Oxford Journals , said: "We continue to see wide variation in uptake, and different levels of interest in ‘author-pays’ open access models between disciplines. The highest uptake has been in areas where more funding for open access is available, such as the life sciences, and we would expect this trend to continue in 2007.”

Oxford Open, launched in July 2005 , gives authors the option of paying for their research to be made freely available online immediately upon publication in the participating journals. Twenty-one titles adopted this model in July 2005, and further titles have joined in 2006, giving 49 journals participating at present.