Open Access
| New Open Access at Oxford website now live |
Background
The Open Access (OA) agenda is gathering momentum in light of recent government statements and research funder mandates.
The University is strongly committed to, and already very active in, disseminating our research for the benefit of the international research community and society more widely. Our research outputs increase in value the more broadly they are available to be considered and used by others.
This page will be developed in coming weeks and months to support Oxford’s researchers and research administrators interpret and address changing external requirements. It is one element of a University-wide Open Access Project which is weighted, at least in the short term, toward the Green OA Route, via the Oxford Research Archive, which provides all (or very nearly all) of the benefits for a much smaller additional cost than Gold OA. The Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research) and the Research Committee have oversight of this Project involving the academic divisions, Research Services, the Bodleian Libraries, PRAS, IT Services and OUP.
Some Definitions
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder (Ref 1). It is typically focused on peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers (Ref 2)
There are two major routes to OA publications:
1. Green OA (Self Archiving): authors publish in any journal and then self-archive a version of the article for free public use in
- their institutional repository;
- a central repository (such as PubMed Central), or
- on some other open website.
This is subject to copyright or other restrictions that may be set by the journal.
2. Gold OA Publishing: authors publish in an open access journal that provides immediate OA to all of its articles on the publisher's website. Hybrid open access journals provide Gold OA only for those individual articles for which their authors (or their author's institution or funder) pay an OA publishing fee (normally termed an Article Processing Charge).
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