Five unexpected things about medical debt
100 million Americans hold medical debt which causes people to forgo or be denied necessary medical care. Luke Messac, a historian and physician, looks at five unexpected things about medical debt.
The risks of boosterism in research writing
At first glance, the significance of a piece of research may not be obvious, either from a paper submitted to a journal or from a published article. Its novelty, importance, and future impact are often uncertain, needing time to become clear to the research community.
Breakthrough and disgrace: Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Pan in retrospect
The 2023 award of the Nobel Prize for literature to the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse brings Norwegian literature into focus for English-speaking readers and provides a fresh angle from which to view the writings of Knut Hamsun.
When fame is not enough: Margaret Walker and the twentieth-century South
Maryemma Graham on writing “The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker”, the complete, authorized biography of America’s first award-winning Black writer.
On the launching of a new library of classical Chinese literature
250 years ago, Ji Yun compiled one of the world’s largest premodern encyclopedias for the Chinese court. This fall Oxford University Press launches the first endowed bilingual translation library of Classical Chinese Literature thanks to a generous gift by Ji Yun’s descendant, Agnes Hsin-mei Hsu-Tang and her husband Oscar Tang.
Science in the time of war: voices from Ukraine
On 23 February 2022, I drove back to Michigan after giving a talk at the University of Kentucky on genome diversity in Ukraine. My niece Zlata Bilanin, a recent college graduate from Ukraine, was with me. She was calling her friends in Kyiv, worried. A single question was on everyone’s mind: will there be a […]
Vaughan Williams’ Four Last Songs: “letting go” of the music
Jonathan Wikeley explores Vaughan Williams’s “Four Last Songs”, looking at the textual meaning, the process of arranging for choir, and composer’s philosophy of “letting go” of the music.
Supporting communities through society publishing
In this blog post, we hear from OUP’s society publishing collaborators and the ways in which they support diverse communities, including through open access publishing.
What does “community” mean to you?
The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is “Community Over Commercialisation”. As part of this, we’re looking at different definitions of “community” used within academic research.
Should animals have the right to vote?
Suppose it were suggested that animals’ interests would be even better protected if we recognized a right of political participation to animals. One way to do that would be to have human representatives cast votes on behalf of animals with respect to different legislative proposals.
Embracing a sustainable open access future: removing barriers to publishing
In this blog post, we explore what OUP is doing to address the challenges to making open access publishing available to all and share information on the volume of articles we waive Article Processing Charges for each year.
Supporting researchers at every career stage
Discover how OUP supports researchers at every career stage—including Early Career Researchers—through our journals publishing.
Animal pharm is closing its doors
Until the middle of the twentieth century, human beings had no defense against deadly microbial diseases. Bubonic plague, cholera, tuberculosis, and syphilis; waves of infectious diseases regularly swept across the globe killing millions of people. But then, suddenly, everything changed. In 1935, the Bayer drug company in Germany was experimenting with the pharmaceutical properties of […]
In praise of sloth
The hero of today’s blog post is the adjective “slow.” No words look less inspiring, but few are more opaque.
Supporting the future of peer review [podcast]
Every year, Peer Review Week honors the contributions of scientists, academics, and researchers in all fields for the hours of work they put into peer reviewing manuscripts to ensure quality work is published. This year, the theme of Peer Review Week is “The Future of Peer Review.”
A free market? The French East India Company and modern capitalism
“Paris is the place to make money, & England is the country to enjoy it.” With what we think we know about capitalism in England and France circa 1790, it is hard to fathom how exactly, a banker in London could have come to this conclusion.