Oxford University Press joins OAPEN-UK project
Oxford University Press (OUP) is joining OAPEN-UK, a collaborative research project exploring open access (OA) scholarly monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
OAPEN-UK is co-funded by Jisc and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is gathering data in order to help funders, authors, publishers and institutions make informed decisions on the future of OA monographs. The project is working in an area where little research exists, and is working to connect with all the key stakeholders to identify and discuss concerns, challenges, perceptions and opportunities relating to a transition to open access monographs.
OAPEN-UK recognises that open access will require changes to current working practices as well as cultural change, and that resistance to change is inevitable. By working with each stakeholder and sharing findings between them, the project promotes understanding and knowledge, and enables stakeholders to make informed decisions based on evidence, rather than assumptions.
OAPEN-UK marks OUP’s first move into the developing world of open access scholarly monographs.
Mandy Hill, publishing director of Global Academic Business at OUP, says:
“We’re excited to join the OAPEN-UK project. OUP has a proud history as a major publisher of scholarly monographs and we are committed to their global dissemination. OAPEN-UK, with its objectives to develop awareness of and data around OA monographs, will play an important part for us in working with the scholarly community to determine the best business models for the future.”
Caren Milloy, head of projects at Jisc Collections, says:
“The participation of OUP in OAPEN-UK marks a significant step in the recognition and acceptance that OA monographs will be part of the scholarly publishing future. The inclusion of the 18 OUP titles will strengthen the usage and sales data we are collecting to compare the performance of open access titles against non-open access titles and will complement the knowledge and expertise feeding into the research.”
The OUP titles cover a range of subjects including law, politics, economics and the early church, and are freely available as PDFs to be read and re-used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivatives Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). The titles are available via the OUP catalogue, Oxford Scholarship Online, OAPEN Library and in Google Books.
More information on the OUP titles and the OAPEN-UK project can be found on the OAPEN-UK website.