Reflecting on Open Access week

I’ve worked in open access publishing at OUP since 2006 – over a period of fascinating and transformative change, during which OA has increasingly become central to academic publishing. Following on the heels of last month’s thought-provoking COASP 2020, this week’s International Open Access Week marks a good time to look back on the progress we’ve made in our open access publishing, and think about the work we still need to do.

As this announcement shows, OUP’s open access publishing continues to grow very rapidly. We expect to publish around 15,000 open access articles in 2020 – almost double the number we published in 2018 (and almost ten times the number we published in 2006!) Encouragingly, this recent sharp growth comes from a wide range of sources – from read and publish agreements, from the growth of new open access journals, from journals ‘flipping’ to OA, and from organic growth of OA content published within our hybrid journals. This multifaceted approach is crucial to a sustainable transition to open access – and we’re keen that in 2021 and beyond we also utilise these and indeed other approaches to continue the transformation. This week, for example, we’ve launched Global Studies Quarterly, a major new open access journal in International Studies, with the International Studies Association. This follows in the footsteps of other recent launches such as Immunotherapy Advances (with the British Society for Immunology), Function (with the American Physiological Society), and Oxford Open Climate Change – exciting new open access journals in vital areas of research. 

Open access is just one component of the broader move towards open research. We rolled out our research data policies this year, and Oxford Open Immunology, the first journal in the Oxford Open series, offers open annotation and open peer review. There is a lot more work to do in this area and it will be a key area of focus for us in the future. The potential for innovation in open research and open access publishing is huge and offers an exciting prospect.

There remain many complex challenges to making a sustainable and inclusive transformation to open access. We need to make sure that open access reflects the diversity of scholarly research across disciplines, geography, and formats. We need to ensure that in the necessary drive for greater speed of publication, access, and re-usability, we keep a clear focus on the importance of academic rigour and review. But looking back on the milestones of the past few years, and indeed back to 2006, it’s great to see the progress that we have made. I hope that when we reach OA Week in 2021, we’ll have lots more landmarks to look back on.