Penn Libraries has entered into a two-year agreement with Oxford University Press.
The agreement, announced last month, allows Penn-affiliated authors to publish open access in OUP without individual processing charges. Penn Libraries also reached open-access agreements with John Benjamins Publishing Company, the Association for Computing Machinery, and extended an existing agreement with Sage Publishing.
OUP — the largest university press in the world — will now permit Penn authors to publish 60% of their work through open-access models. Articles can be published on either the gold journals, which offer fully open-access articles, or hybrid journals.
“Open access agreements help Penn authors advance their goals of reaching essential audiences and achieving meaningful impact,” Associate Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications Alexa Pearce wrote in the press release. “Over the long term, the libraries’ commitment to open access will significantly expand the global reach and visibility of knowledge generated at Penn.”
Articles eligible for publishing without fees require at least one Penn-affiliated corresponding author. The agreement includes access for Penn faculty based in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, provided they select Penn as their primary affiliation.
OUP publishes over 500 hybrid and open-access journals in a variety of academic disciplines. Members of the Penn community are already able to view OUP journal content, and will continue to have access.
As part of the agreement, Penn authors have “no limit on the number of eligible articles published by Penn authors each year,” according to the press release.
The release also highlights that publications with open access are cited “more often than publications behind a paywall” and are viewed by a “wider audience.”
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“As a result, open access scholarship stimulates new research, which can in turn address real-world challenges through governmental policies, medical breakthroughs, and investment in new technologies,” the release reads. “By contributing solutions to the world’s most pressing problems, open access can help rebuild public trust in science and higher education.”
Maintaining public access to research articles is often a requirement for universities like Penn to receive federal funding.
Penn — a designated R1 institution — describes itself as “one of the nation’s top research universities.” The University employs over 5,000 faculty researchers and invests $2 billion across 230 research centers and institutes.
On Feb. 25, The Daily Pennsylvanian found that Penn-affiliated researchers published nearly 400 original research articles in 12 top scientific research journals over the last year, including more than 200 articles published by the Perelman School of Medicine.
“Everything in the scientific ecosystem is dependent on where your work gets published,” Penn Medicine Neurosurgery Department Vice Chair for Research and professor Michael Beauchamp told the DP at the time, adding that high-impact journal visibility can help researchers secure funding and receive promotions.
Penn Libraries also maintains open-access agreements with Cambridge University Press, the Company of Biologists, Elsevier, Emerald, the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Springer, and Wiley.
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Staff reporter Luke Petersen covers national politics and can be reached at petersen@thedp.com. At Penn, he studies philosophy, politics, and economics. Follow him on X @LukePetersen06.
