Open Access at Oxford Journals Fiona Kearney Director, UK Business Development & Rights 27 June 2009, UCL SILS visit

Oxford University Press and Oxford Journals – Intro Open Access – Definition, Oxford Journals approach? Oxford Open Fully Open Access Hybrid model ‘Green’ OA Self-archiving rights for Oxford Journal authors Depositing into PMC Concluding comments/Next Steps Q&A Summary of presentation

OUP and Oxford Journals  Is a department of the University of Oxford  Established in 1478  Oldest, largest and most international university press in the world  Publish more than 4,500 new books a year  A presence in more than 50 countries  Employs more than 4000 people worldwide  Oxford Journals – relatively new division  Publishes approximately 230 academic and practitioner journals  Two-thirds of the journals published in partnership with learned societies

Open Access: Our Approach Central remit to maximise dissemination of research information BUT: - to also maintain the highest standards of quality and integrity - Exploration of new publishing models sits comfortably with this goal - opportunity to share findings and experiences with wider community - wider benefit to scholarly communication

Why? Experiments are designed to discover whether open access models can really achieve wider, more cost effective dissemination than subscription-based models Need to determine whether open access models are financially viable if they are to be widely adopted in a successful way Need to collect valuable primary evidence for analysis to inform future decisions Need to experiment responsibly, protecting quality and brands of journals and interests of learned society partners

Open access in this context ‘Gold’ open access Free online access to journal version immediately upon publication All free to reuse content for non-commercial purposes Aim to fund model through author charges ‘Green’ open access Self-archiving policies for authors for institutional repositories etc

Oxford Open  Launched early 2005 – the OA brand for Oxford Journals  A full OA model for 5 Oxford journals now  Nucleic Acids Research, DNA Research, DATABASE, AoB Plants, Bioscience Horizons and Genome Biology and Evolution  An optional OA model for approx 80+ journals [and growing]: £1500 or £900 author charge depending on whether from institution with membership  Model utilises a mixture of funding sources: publication charges, subscriptions, advertising, secondary rights etc

Nucleic Acids Research Background  2009: Volume 39; 24 issues a year  ~1200 articles pa  Impact Factor  (up from in previous year)  One of the largest and most successful Oxford-owned titles  2004: ~1500 regular institutional subscriptions and 2500 extra sites accessing the journal via consortia and developing countries program

Nucleic Acids Research – When and Why OA?  2004: Database issue available OA  March-April 2004: large-scale survey of NAR authors and reviewers  1052 respondents – 14% response rate  majority supported a move to full OA partially funded by author publication charges  discussions with the librarian community – expressed support  primary aim of NAR model: maintain revenue levels of the journal through combination of author and institutional payments

NAR’s author open access charges Year Non-member Member 2005 £900/$1500 £300/$ £1000/$1900 £500/$ £1250/$2370 £625/$ £1370/$2670 £685/$ £1370/$2670 £685/$1335 Institutional membership of NAR. This secures substantially discounted publication charges for Corresponding authors based at the member institution (see below). Membership for 2008 is £2195 / $4390 / €3293.

NAR actual open access charge payments Period% Requesting waiver % Paying appropriate charge % Accessing member form % Accessing non- member form 2005~8% (inc. 3% funded by JISC) 92%71%29% 20067%93%37%63% 20076%94%23%77%

NAR success indicators: submission trends

The Business Model – additional features Simultaneous publication in PubMed Central and PMC International Archives eg UKPMC unlimited reuse for research and education purposes: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Use Licence including machine readable element Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No © 2009 The Author(s) This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2009 The Author(s) This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. authors retain copyright (as for majority of Oxford Journals) unrestricted self-archiving rights – compliant with Wellcome, NIH, ARC etc

Progress Report - NAR  Approximately 94% of authors agreeing to pay appropriate charges in 2007  Good take-up of institutional membership option – approx 23% of authors getting the member discounts  Print subscriptions have higher than average attrition rate, but not as steeply as anticipated  Strong performance of other revenue streams to date: reprints, licensing etc

NAR success indicators: revenue by type 47% 83% 7% 39% 7%8%9%

Progress Report: Research 3 Key Areas of Research  Author/Reader Study for Nucleic Acids Research  LISU Evaluation of Open Access Experiment  impact on citations and usage  CIBER weblog analysis of Nucleic Acids Research 

NAR Author/Reader Survey  April 2006  Survey sent to 13,000 people via online submission and peer review database  1144 responses (9%)  AIM: gain a better understanding of the impact of the move to full OA on authors and readers  focus on subset of responses (293/25%) who had published one paper as main/corresponding author in 2005  Highly representative subset  92% of subset gave NAR satisfaction rating of 4 or 5

Do NAR authors want OA?

NAR Survey Results Would you have published your paper(s) in NAR if it had not offered open access? Response % Yes79% No7% Don’t know14%

NAR: Author Archiving - Accepted Manuscripts NAR Survey Results Percentage

Do authors want OA? Percentage NAR: Author Archiving – Final Published Form

CIBER Research  AIM: determine the impact of going open access on the use and users of Nucleic Acids Research  Were there any increases or changes in usage patterns as a result?  Did the content start to reach the kinds of people that OA aspires to reach?  OA considered in context of other agents that drive use  Search engines, ‘big deal,’ robots etc  Wanted to develop a methodology – web log analysis, that enabled accurate measurement of the relative impact of the key drivers  Surveyed period of 2003, 2004 and 2005 (six months)  1.5m separate IP numbers, 7.m search sessions, 13.5m unique items

NAR: Daily article views for Does OA increase usage? Source: Ciber study, 2006

CIBER Research – key findings  Strong and robust evidence of the impact of search engines  The impact of OA on the journal should not be looked at too narrowly  OA contributed to an additional increase in usage of 7-8%  Marked switch of use from abstracts to full-text  Brought in new users to the journal e.g. from Eastern bloc, students  OA and other access initiatives will lead in the longer run to a usage pattern which is much more seasonal and volatile

NAR: the future Assuming print subscriptions continue to fall (or will they plateau?) will need further increase in author charges. Success depends on authors being willing and able to pay, and on funders making money available. Continue to gather author feedback (care: don’t always do what they say they will) NAR must remain attractive to authors in many ways

First ~20 journals launched in July 2005 Now 80 journals participating across a range of disciplines Current optional charges: £1500 full price £900 for authors at subscribing institutions Provides authors and/or their funding bodies with a choice Oxford Open – optional open access

Are authors choosing to pay for open access? Oxford Open uptake in 2008

Case study: Bioinformatics optional open access Bioinformatics Volume 25 in 2009; 24 issues/~600 articles pa 2008 impact factor of compared with previous impact factor in 2006 of A booming area with open access a hot topic In 2004 survey, 44% of authors said they would choose to pay ~£900 for optional open access Introduced optional open access in July 2005: Regular articles – £1500 full price; £900 subscribers Shorter Application Notes – £750 full; £400 subscribers

Optional Oxford Open: what next? In 2009, online subscription prices for 44 optional journals were adjusted to reflect open access uptake in titles saw an absolute reduction Overall, average online-only price increase from 2008 to 2009 was 6.7% BUT for the Oxford Open titles it was 4.4% Open access charges are currently the same for all optional journals – revenue modelling underway to gauge need for different rates to reflect individual journal revenues and uptake We must consider the potential impact on high quality submissions if we did not offer open access option Are carrying out some similar research into the usage of the hybrid content with CIBER

Further Information Description of Oxford Journals OA models, FAQ’s and titles participating Report of one-day conference presenting results of Oxford OA experiments CIBER/UCL Centre for Publishing LISU

For further information, please contact Fiona Kearney Director, UK Business Development & Rights Tel: +44 (0)