OUP joins OAPEN-UK project

Oxford University Press (OUP) is joining OAPEN-UK. This collaborative research project exploring open-access (OA) scholarly monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences is gathering data in order to help funders, authors, publishers and institutions make informed decisions on the future of OA monographs. The project, which is co-funded by Jisc and the Arts and Humanities Research Council is working to connect the key stakeholders to identify and discuss concerns, challenges, perceptions and opportunities relating to a transition to OA monographs.

According to the publisher, OAPEN-UK marks OUP’s first move into the world of OA scholarly monographs. Mandy Hill, publishing director of global academic business at OUP, commented: '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, added: '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 CC BY-NC-ND licence. The titles are available via the OUP catalogue, Oxford Scholarship Online, OAPEN Library and in Google Books.