A more open world should work for everyone: Celebrating International Open Access Week 2021

International Open Access Week takes place between Monday 25 October and Sunday 31 October this year. The theme for this year is It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity. Open research means faster, more equitable access to cutting edge findings, driving disciplines forward, and introducing transparency into the research process. As the world’s largest university press publisher of open access content, Oxford University Press believes a more open world should work for everyone.

Open access at OUP

The last 12 months have been busy in the world of open research. With rapid policy developments including the announcement and responses to the UKRI open access policy and the formal launch of Plan S, it’s no surprise that the rate and volume of open access publishing and surrounding activity has increased.

At OUP, this year, we reached a milestone 100,000 articles published via open access since 2004 with more than 1,500 articles now published every month. We now publish more than 90 fully open access journals and offer an open access publishing option on over 400 of our journals, the majority of which are published in partnership with learned societies from around the world.

OUP now has 22 Read & Publish deals in place ranging from the US to China. This year saw our first agreement in Australia and New Zealand, following negotiations with the Council of Australian University Librarians. We have also renewed a number of existing agreements and reached new ones with Jisc in the UK, FineLib in Finland, and IreL in Ireland.

New publishing 
Our Oxford Open series, which launched in April 2020, now comprises six titles, ranging from Climate Change to Neuroscience. This flagship series is underpinned by a set of guiding principles which include an emphasis on open research, including open data and open peer review, depending on the field.

From a books perspective, we reached another important milestone this year, having published more than 150 open access books – 152 to be precise! Our most read OA book of this year so far is Impossible Worlds by Francesco Berto and Mark Jago, exploring the theory of information, truth in fiction, and reasoning about the impossible.

New policies
Our new research data policies also launched last year and have been adopted on over 350 of the journals published by OUP. Over 120 journals require that authors include a Data Availability statement in their article. The policy offers four different levels in order to accommodate the varying needs and established disciplinary practices across subject areas, recognizing the fundamental idea that a more open world needs to be flexible to be inclusive.

Highlights of Open Access Week at OUP
This week, we’ll be exploring some of the key aspects of open research from the perspective of a university press. Look out for blog posts on the OUPblog about open access for humanities and social sciences and future innovation in open research, the latest episode of the Oxford Comment podcast which will explore the impact of opening research, and our dedicated open access collection showcasing recent open access content that has shaped policy.