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Advancing open access in the UK

Oxford University Press and Jisc, the education and research not-for-profit, have held a successful and productive Read & Publish (R&P) agreement since 2021. The agreement provides UK universities access to OUP’s prestigious journal collection and allows researchers to publish their research open access (OA) in OUP’s journals.

By publishing OA, researchers can achieve greater visibility and impact for their research findings and be part of a movement seeking to improve scholarly communication, increase trust in research literature, and accelerate progress towards new outcomes.

R&P agreements between academic institutions and publishers, sometimes known as Transformative Agreements, are an important facilitator in the transition to a more open research cycle. OUP’s R&P agreements provide the academic community with transparent, flexible, and inclusive options for OA publishing. Our agreements cover more than 900 institutions in different markets across the world.

This blog post showcases a selection of the achievements of UK researchers who have published their work OA in an OUP journal via our agreement with Jisc.

Showcasing the achievements of UK researchers

Published articles x 300

The number of open access articles published by UK researchers in our agreement with Jisc was 300 x higher in 2022 compared to 2020. Across our global publishing today, 45% of the research articles we have published are OA (as of July 2023).

Increases across all disciplines

The biggest increase in OA publishing since the deal began was achieved by researchers in the life sciences, followed by medicine, and the social sciences. Our R&P agreements are inclusive of all research disciplines and provide opportunities for researchers who don’t have access to specific OA funding or those working in fields that haven’t previously been able to realise the benefits of OA publishing.

8.8 million downloads

Open access articles published in OUP journals get 100% more downloads than non-OA articles. For researchers in the UK who published an article through the Jisc agreement in 2021 and 2022, this means 8,854,419 views of their work.

Our most-read articles include:

Spotlight on the most-read article: Victoria Kettle et al. in Journal of Public Health

20,000 citations

OUP’s open access articles have the second highest mean lifetime citation rate of all major academic publishers, demonstrating the quality and impact of our publishing (source: Dimensions). Open access articles by authors at Jisc institutions published in 2021 and 2022 have achieved 19,827 citations of their work, as of July 2023.

The top cited articles include:

Unsurprisingly the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is clear in our top read and top cited publications. This demonstrates both the need for reliable and trustworthy peer-reviewed research during a global crisis as well as the value of scholarly literature for helping society progress towards more positive health outcomes for people across the globe.

Spotlight on the Geriatric Medicine Research Collaborative’s article in Age and Ageing

Featured image by Nickbeer, via Canva

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