Open Access News

Can open access (OA) be financially viable, not just in the sense of making enough revenue to cover costs, but also generating a surplus? What are the views of researchers, librarians and funding agencies? What effect does OA have on usage and citations? These questions formed the focus of the Oxford Journals event, and while there are still no firm answers, the initial research findings presented on OUP’s experimentation with the OA model make a useful contribution to a debate that is crying out for more solid data. Findings were presented relating to three different open access business models operated by OUP - full open access, optional open access and sponsored open access.

Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Oxford Journals, and Claire Saxby, Senior Editor, Oxford Journals, provided insight into the success of the models so far from a financial viability perspective. The publisher has one full open access journal, Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), which adopted the model at the beginning of 2005. Although NAR print subscriptions were already declining steadily before full open access was introduced in 2005, after that time they dropped rapidly. The rising income from author charges did not compensate for loss of revenue from print and online subscriptions, and average income per article dropped from USD4,647 in 2004 to USD3,622 in 2005. As a result, the journal has had to introduce cost-cutting measures. OUP was surprised that fewer institutions than expected took out institutional membership to enable authors from their institutions to pay discounted author fees for NAR....Martin Richardson accepted that author’s expectations of the publishing process might change when they are paying for it, and expects that authors will gradually develop a more consumer approach....

OUP's Oxford Open programme, which allows authors to choose whether they want to publish in a particular journal under an open access or a traditional subscription model, was launched in July 2005 and there are now 49 OUP journals participating in total, across a range of disciplines. Between January and April 2006 there has been 7% uptake of the OA option from authors, but the large variation between subject areas is noticeable, with 11.3% uptake in Life Sciences, 4.8% in Medicine and 2.2% in Social Sciences & Humanities. So far, there has been no attrition in subscriptions for these journals, probably because OUP has dropped the pricing of the journal subscription according to the amount of OA content that is included....

PS: Oxford's full report of the results should be released next week. In the meantime you can find more details in the presentations from the Oxford Open Access Workshop (London, June 5, 2006).