Author Pays Open Access at Oxford Journals

Fiona Bennett

Director, UK Business Development & Rights

20 June 2008, UCL SILS visit

• Oxford University Press and Oxford Journals – Intro

• Open Access – Definition, Oxford Journals approach?

• Oxford Open • Nucleic Acids Research• Hybrid model

• Concluding comments/Next Steps

• Q&A

Summary of presentation

OUP and Oxford Journals

Is a department of the University of Oxford

Established in 1478

Oldest, largest and most international university press in the world

Publish more than 4,500 new books a year

A presence in more than 50 countries

Employs more than 4000 people worldwide

Oxford Journals – relatively new division

Publishes approximately 211 academic and practitioner journals

Two-thirds of the journals published in partnership with learned societies

Open Access: Our Approach

Central remit to maximise dissemination of research information

BUT:

- to also maintain the highest standards of quality and integrity

- Exploration of new publishing models sits comfortably with this goal

- opportunity to share findings and experiences with wider community

- wider benefit to scholarly communication

Why?

Experiments are designed to discover whether open access models can really achieve wider, more cost effective dissemination than subscription-based models

Need to determine whether open access models are financially viable if they are to be widely adopted in a successful way

Need to collect valuable primary evidence for analysis to inform future decisions

Need to experiment responsibly, protecting quality and brands of journals and interests of learned society partners

Open access in this context

• ‘Gold’ open access

•Free online access to journal version immediately upon publication

•All free to reuse content for non-commercial purposes

•Aim to fund model through author charges

• [not covered here: our policies on author self archiving, free back archives etc.]

Oxford Open

Launched early 2005 – the OA brand for Oxford Journals

A full OA model for Nucleic Acids Research

An optional OA model for approx 64 journals [and growing]: £1500 or £800 author charge depending on whether from institution with membership

Fully OA (sponsored) model for eCAM initially although now hybrid

Full OA model for DNA Research

Model utilises a mixture of funding sources: publication charges, subscriptions, advertising, secondary rights etc

Nucleic Acids Research

Background

2008: Volume 36; 24 issues a year

~1200 articles pa

Impact Factor 2008 6.954 (up from 6.317 in previous year)

One of the largest and most successful Oxford-owned titles 2004: ~1500 regular institutional subscriptions and 2500 extra

sites accessing the journal via consortia and developing countries program

Nucleic Acids Research – When and Why OA?

2004: Database issue available OA

March-April 2004: large-scale survey of NAR authors and reviewers

1052 respondents – 14% response rate

majority supported a move to full OA partially funded by author publication charges

discussions with the librarian community – expressed support

primary aim of NAR model: maintain revenue levels of the journal through combination of author and institutional payments

NAR’s author open access charges

Year Non-member Member

2005 £900/$1500 £300/$500

2006 £1000/$1900 £500/$950

2007 £1250/$2370 £625/$1185

2008 £1370/$2670 £685/$1335

Institutional membership of NAR. This secures substantially discounted publication charges for Corresponding authors based at the member institution (see below). Membership for 2008 is £2090 / $4180 / €3135.

In 2007, >93% were paying the appropriate charge

17%: member form

83%: non-member form

NAR actual open access charge payments

Period % Requesting waiver

% Paying appropriate charge

% Accessing member form

% Accessing non-member form

2005 ~8% (inc. 3% funded by JISC)

92% 71% 29%

2006 7% 93% 37% 63%

2007 est.

6% 94% 23% 77%

NAR success indicators: submission trends

Approximate no. NAR submissions received 2002–2007

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 est

Year

No

. su

bm

issi

on

s

The Business Model – additional features

•Simultaneous publication in PubMed Central and PMC International Archives eg UKPMC

• unlimited reuse for research and education purposes: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Use Licence including machine readable element

• Nucleic Acids Research, 2007, Vol. 35, No. 8 2533-2543© 2007 The Author(s) This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

• authors retain copyright (as for majority of Oxford Journals)

• unrestricted self-archiving rights – compliant with Wellcome, NIH, ARC etc

Progress Report - NAR

Approximately 94% of authors agreeing to pay appropriate charges in 2007

Good take-up of institutional membership option – approx 23% of authors getting the member discounts

Print subscriptions have higher than average attrition rate, but not as steeply as anticipated

Strong performance of other revenue streams to date: reprints, licensing etc

NAR success indicators: revenue by type

20062004

Author chargesInstitutional membershipsPrint subscriptionsOther 47%

83% 7%

39%

7%8%9%

Progress Report: Research

3 Key Areas of Research

Author/Reader Study for Nucleic Acids Research

LISU Evaluation of Open Access Experiment impact on citations and usage

CIBER weblog analysis of Nucleic Acids Research

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/news/oa_report.pdf

NAR Author/Reader Survey

April 2006

Survey sent to 13,000 people via online submission and peer review database

1144 responses (9%)

AIM: gain a better understanding of the impact of the move to full OA on authors and readers

focus on subset of responses (293/25%) who had published one paper as main/corresponding author in 2005

Highly representative subset 92% of subset gave NAR satisfaction rating of 4 or 5

Do NAR authors want OA?

Author perceptions of NAR (Q8) Mean score (1 = strongly agree)(respondent subset – 2005: 1 paper: main author)

2.2

2.06

1.94

1.88

1.84

1.76

1.7

1.62

0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5

Unrestricted re-use of my article after publication is important tome

I perceive the readership of an open access journal to be largerthan a subscription-access journal

The journal has a well respected editorial team

The journal provides high quality peer review

The principle of free access for all is important to me

The journal's impact factor is attractive

NAR is prestigious in my field

The journal provides rapid publication

NAR Survey Results

Would you have published your paper(s) in NAR if it had not offered open access?

Response %

Yes 79%

No 7%

Don’t know 14%

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60

Posted it on mypersonal web page

Posted it on mydepartment's web site

Deposited it in anelectronic institutional

repository

Deposited it in anelectronic subject-based repository

2005 2006

NAR: Author Archiving - Accepted Manuscripts

NAR Survey Results

Percentage

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60

Posted it on my personalweb page

Posted it on mydepartment's web site

Deposited it in anelectronic institutional

repository

Deposited it in anelectronic subject-based

repository

2005 2006

Do authors want OA?

Percentage

NAR: Author Archiving – Final Published Form

CIBER Research

AIM: determine the impact of going open access on the use and users of Nucleic Acids Research

Were there any increases or changes in usage patterns as a result? Did the content start to reach the kinds of people that OA aspires

to reach?

OA considered in context of other agents that drive use Search engines, ‘big deal,’ robots etc

Wanted to develop a methodology – web log analysis, that enabled accurate measurement of the relative impact of the key drivers

Surveyed period of 2003, 2004 and 2005 (six months)

1.5m separate IP numbers, 7.m search sessions, 13.5m unique items

NAR: Daily article views for 2003-2005

14000

12000

10000

8000

6000

4000

2000

0

Does OA increase usage?

Source: Ciber study, 2006

CIBER Research – key findings

Strong and robust evidence of the impact of search engines

The impact of OA on the journal should not be looked at too narrowly

OA contributed to an additional increase in usage of 7-8%

Marked switch of use from abstracts to full-text

Brought in new users to the journal e.g. from Eastern bloc, students

OA and other access initiatives will lead in the longer run to a usage pattern which is much more seasonal and volatile

NAR: the future

• Assuming print subscriptions continue to fall (or will they plateau?) will need further increase in author charges.

• Success depends on authors being willing and able to pay, and on funders making money available.

• Continue to gather author feedback (care: don’t always do what they say they will)

• NAR must remain attractive to authors in many ways

• First ~20 journals launched in July 2005

• Now 64 journals participating across a range of disciplines

• Current optional charges:

•£1500 full price

•£800 for authors at subscribing institutions

Oxford Open – optional open access

Are authors choosing to pay for open access?

Oxford Open uptake in 2006

Subject Area No. of Journals

Papers Published

OA Papers

% Uptake

Medicine 22 3945 180 5.3

Life Sciences 17 3050 321 7.6

Social Sciences & Humanities

12 405 6 1.1

Mathematics 3 304 5 1.8

Total 54 7704 512 6.6

Case study: Bioinformatics optional open access

Bioinformatics

• Volume 23 in 2007; 24 issues/~600 articles pa

• 2006 impact factor of 4.894

• A booming area with open access a hot topic

• In 2004 survey, 44% of authors said they would

choose to pay ~£900 for optional open access

• Introduced optional open access in July 2005:

•Regular articles – £1500 full price; £800

subscribers

•Shorter Application Notes – £750 full;

£400 subscribers

Bioinformatics actual uptake trends

Period No. papers Published

% Open Access Papers

Jan–Dec 2006 575 21%

Jan–Jun 2007 309 23%

• Of the 120 Bioinformatics papers published open access in 2006:• 54% were regular articles; 46% were Application Notes• 87% paid the subscribing institution rate (£400–800); 13% paid

the full rate (£750–1500)

Optional Oxford Open: what next?

• In 2008, online subscription prices for 28 optional journals are being adjusted to reflect change in open access pages between 2005 and 2006.

• Will we lose subscriptions because of open access option? It’s too early to tell.

• Open access charges are currently the same for all optional journals – revenue modelling underway to gauge need for different rates to reflect individual journal revenues and uptake

• We must consider the potential impact on high quality submissions if we did not offer open access option

• Are carrying out some similar research into the usage of the hybrid content with CIBER – results due to be published soon

Further Information

Description of Oxford Journals OA models, FAQ’s and titles participating

www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/

Report of one-day conference presenting results of Oxford OA experiments

www.oxfordjournals.org/news/oa_report.pdf

CIBER/UCL Centre for Publishing

www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk/research.html

LISU

www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/dils/lisu/index.html

For further information, please contact

Fiona BennettDirector, UK Business Development & Rights

Tel: +44 (0) 1865 353755

Email: fiona.bennett@oup.com