Sunday, July 27, 2008

Kudos to Oxford: transitioning to open access

Kudos to Oxford, which continues to provide a great role model for transitioning to open access, with an announcement reminding subscribers about discounts for their authors on open access charges, a new program to extend these discounts to consortial subscribers, and price adjustments to take open access fees revenue into account for the third year in a row. For NIH-funded authors, the OA charges include not only full OA, but also deposit in PMC.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access and Resources and Tips: Publishers series.

Update and comment: while OUP is a role model in this one aspect, OUP's "green" policies need some significant shaping up to be truly exemplary. Currently, OUP is pale green, allowing author self-archiving but with significant restrictions, such as lengthy embargoes. To be truly exemplary, OUP should adopt a full green policy, permitting (or better yet, like Nature, encouraging) author self-archiving of postprints immediately on acceptance for publication. This is not only good OA policy; it is good publishing policy, to keep authors who are increasingly needing to provide OA to fulfill OA mandate policies, or to take advantage of the OA impact advantage as more and more authors become aware of this. [Thanks to Stevan Harnad for the tip on the OUP pale green policy].